Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the Prison Industrial Complex

Raymond Magsaysay January, 2021

Abstract

Recent uprisings against racial injustice, sparked by the killings of George

Floyd and others, have triggered urgent calls to overhaul the U.S. criminal “justice” system. Yet Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), the fastest-growing racial group in the country, have largely been left out of these conversations. Identifying and addressing this issue, I intercalate AAPIs into powerful, contemporary critiques of the prison industrial complex, including emergent abolitionist legal scholarship. I argue that the model minority myth, an anti-Black racial project, leads to the exclusion of AAPIs in mainstream and critical studies of crime and carcerality. I begin the intervention by critiquing the lacuna that exists within Asian American Jurisprudence, specifically the erasure of criminalized AAPIs’ voices and experiences. I then demonstrate that AAPIs are caught in the carceral web of mass incarceration by highlighting the lived experiences of AAPI youth within the school-to-prison pipeline, in addition to excavating the minimal publicly available data on AAPI prison populations. Adopting multidisciplinary and multimodal methods, I identify and analyze distinct forms of racial profiling and racialized bullying that drive AAPI students out of schools and into prisons. I pay specific attention to the criminalization of various AAPI youth subgroups as whiz kids, gang members, or terrorists. In uncovering previously unexamined dimensions of the criminal system, I stress how the exclusion of AAPIs in critical discourse obscures the actual scale of the carceral state, erases complex intra- and interracial dynamics of power, marginalizes criminalized AAPIs, and concurrently reinforces anti-Blackness and other toxic ideologies. The Article reaffirms critical race, intersectional, and abolitionist analyses of race and criminalization. It also directly links Asian American Jurisprudence to on-going abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex. I conclude with a proffer of abolitionist-informed solutions to the school-to-prison pipeline such as the implementation of an Ethnic Studies curriculum. Lastly, I issue a call, particularly to AAPI communities, for fiercer and more meaningful coalition-building.

No matter how good we are at studying, studying alone is not going to abolish

the prison industrial complex. I think our orientation is more that study is essential to organizing for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. And we need study to organize well.

– Rachel Herzing ¹

I. Introduction: Silenced Stories²

Eddy Zheng and his family moved to Oakland’s Chinatown in 1982 from southern China.³ For Eddy,⁴ the following years in the U.S. were difficult. He often felt alone as his two older siblings balanced work and school, and he barely saw his parents who were working hard to provide for the entire family. His father worked at Burger King while his mother moved in with another family for a babysitting job. At school, Eddy continually struggled due to his limited English. He eventually started to skip class, choosing to leave school rather than listen to lessons he barely understood. He began to spend time at the local playground. There, he went along with dares from other kids to commit petty crimes like shoplifting since he was “amazed by all the materialistic stuff that other kids had.”⁵

When Eddy was sixteen, he and his friends committed an armed robbery of a family who owned multiple shops in Chinatown. They robbed them at gunpoint and then broke into their stores and stole various items amounting to $34,000. The group was ultimately caught and arrested. Eddy was charged with sixteen felony counts including kidnaprobbery. Unable to afford an attorney and with a limited understanding of the criminal system,⁶ he and his family thought it best to plead guilty to the charges.

“We had no English and no money to pay a lawyer,” Mrs. Zheng says in Cantonese. “Everyone told us that Eddy should admit to it, and then there would be a lighter sentence. But actually, it was a heavier sentence. It was the opposite of what we were told.”⁷

Eddy, at sixteen, was tried as an adult. He pled guilty to sixteen felony counts and was sentenced to a term of between seven years to life in prison.

While imprisoned, Eddy struggled with guilt and shame and began to cope by enrolling in numerous self-help programs. He learned English, obtained his college degree, and became an advocate for prison reform and rehabilitation. In 2002 at San Quentin State Prison, Eddy, alongside two other Asian American prisoners, Rico Remeidio and Viêt Mike Ngo, wrote a proposal that advocated for more Ethnic Studies in the curriculum, rejected plans of corporate sponsorship for the rehabilitation programs, and “objected to the local prison policy that prohibited correspondence between prisoners and volunteers.”⁸ After the proposal was handed in, the warden of San Quentin placed the three signees in solitary confinement pending an investigation. Eddy was put in “the hole” for eleven months.⁹ He would continue to become an advocate while in prison, even co-editing the first anthology of work by Asian American and Pacific Islander prisoners while behind bars.¹⁰ In 2005, Eddy was released on parole after eighteen years in prison.

This, however, did not signify freedom for him. Upon release from prison, he became embroiled in a complex legal battle against deportation that would put him in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security for another two years.¹¹ When he was released from immigration detention, his order of deportation remained until Governor Jerry Brown pardoned him in April 2015.¹² Today, Eddy continues to advocate for the incarcerated and deported. He spearheads the New Breath Foundation and collaborates with numerous organizations including the Community Youth Center of San Francisco, the San Francisco Reentry Council, and the Asian Prisoners Support Committee.¹³

Eddy’s story is just one of the almost seven million¹⁴ lived realities of people who have been entangled with the U.S. criminal system in 2020 alone.¹⁵ His story is a powerful testimony of suffering and struggle, of resilience and empowerment. It is as saddening as it is inspiring, as powerful as it is revealing. Indeed, his story provides critical insights into the different dimensions of the criminal system. It sheds light on the factors that may push one to “commit crime” and the stinging shame and stigma associated with incarceration. Yet as moving and illuminating as it is, his story, along with those of other criminalized¹⁶ Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to follow, is often unheard and made silent. These stories are rarely in the news or on the television.¹⁷ In a society where the mainstream media peddles headlines like “Asians Make It Big in America,” “The Asian Advantage,” “The Model Minority Is Losing Its Patience,” “Rise of the Tiger Nation,” “How Asian-Americans are Transforming the Face of US wealth,” and “Asian-Americans Lead All Others in Household Income,”¹⁸ the voices and stories of Eddy and others are subsumed under the model minority myth—the stereotypical notion that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs)¹⁹ are faring extremely well in society due to their innate thrift, diligence, intelligence, and lawabiding nature.²⁰

Mainstream media is not alone in erasing the stories of criminalized Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Academia also silences and ignores them. A cursory search containing any combination of the keywords “Asian American,” “Pacific Islander” with “crime,” “criminology,” and/or “incarceration” in major social science databases yields few, if any, relevant results.²¹ Legal databases do not fare much better.²² As Federal Public Defender Harvey Gee notes, AAPIs are scantly discussed in criminal law and procedure scholarship, and to the extent that they are, references typically amount to cursory mentions or abstract analyses.²³ In other legal commentaries, discussions of AAPI criminalization or incarceration are limited to issues of immigration, citizenship, gangs, culture, or victimhood.²⁴

Even within critical disciplines and social justice-oriented advocacy, there is little about Asian American and Pacific Islander incarceration. Multiracial and feminist criminologies have denoted that crime and the carceral system are social constructs that reflect and reinforce systems of oppression. They highlight how crime and “crime control” are “inseparable from the changing relations of inequality, hierarchy, and power” in society.²⁵ These fields contribute significantly to analyses and understandings of crime, with multiracial criminology specifically illustrating how the U.S. criminal system is a white supremacist project²⁶ of “mass incarceration” that disproportionately places people of color behind bars and “redesigns” systems of racial caste.²⁷ But despite emphases on the criminalization of people of color, critical scholars and advocates barely incorporate Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the study of mass incarceration.²⁸ It is as if, in the words of Professor Frank Wu:

Even people who are sympathetic to civil rights in general, including other people of color, sometimes resist mentioning civil rights and [AAPIs] together in the same sentence. It is as if [AAPI] civil rights concerns can be ruled out categorically without the need for serious consideration of the facts, because everyone knows that [AAPIs] are prospering.²⁹

This reticence that Professor Wu perceives is especially notable today, where demands for justice and calls to abolish policing and prisons have reached new heights.³⁰

The study of contemporary AAPI experiences with mass incarceration is also conspicuously absent within Asian American Studies and especially Asian American Jurisprudence—both arguably social, political, and artistic movements.³¹ The fields call for an end to AAPI erasure in scholarship. They critique and disrupt the traditional Black/white dyad or the “white-over-Black” paradigm.³² They constantly identify and challenge racist narratives about AAPIs, including the model minority myth’s supposition that AAPI communities are prospering past racial inequality.³³ They historicize and theorize AAPI experiences of subordination and resistance, analogizing to and distinguishing from the experiences of other racial groups.³⁴ They generate vigorous debate within and beyond AAPI communities.³⁵ They call for the formation of meaningful coalitions within and across various groups.³⁶ They imagine and inspire a socially just world, free of white supremacy and other structures of domination.³⁷ Yet despite all these contributions, both fields have barely interrogated the simplistic notion that AAPIs are “law-abiding citizens who [keep] their heads down”³⁸ and are uninvolved with the criminal system.

But as Eddy’s story reveals, AAPIs are impacted by mass incarceration. They are in the nation’s prisons, categorized by the Bureau of Justice Statistics—the government’s primary source for criminal system statistics—and most other informational systems as “Others,”³⁹ a “fitting description for a population that is often overlooked.”⁴⁰ In 2019, there were 167,400 “Others” in the state and federal prison system, comprising about 12 percent of the state and federal prison population.⁴¹ The incarceration rate for “Others” was 1,176 per 100,000 U.S. residents–the second highest for any group.⁴² However, because the “Others” category actually includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and people of more than one race, a precise number of AAPI prisoners is difficult to ascertain.⁴³ Nevertheless, scholars estimate that the number of AAPI prisoners “increased by over 250% between 1990 to 2000.”⁴⁴ Between 1999 and 2004, the AAPI prison population surged by 30 percent, climbing from 9,825 to 12,799, while the white prison population only increased by 2.5 percent and the Black prison population during the same time period decreased by 1.9 percent.⁴⁵ Recent data shows that the incarceration rate of AAPIs “quadrupled between 2000 and 2010, and disaggregated data shows that certain subgroups, such as Southeast Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, are arrested and incarcerated at much higher rates than average.”⁴⁶ Dated data reflects this trend as well. From 1977 to 1997:

API arrests in the U.S. increased 726 percent between 1977 and 1997. Meanwhile the number of African American arrests decreased by 30% in this same period. This increase far exceeds proportional growth of the overall U.S. API population during this same approximate twenty year period which grew from 3.7 million in 1980 to 10.2 million in 2000, a 276% increase.⁴⁷

In 2004, while arrests of “African American, Native American, and Caucasian youth [] decreased nationally, arrests of Asian and Pacific Islander boys and girls increased by 11.4%.”⁴⁸ In some cities across the country, this troubling trend persisted, especially for certain ethnicities under the diverse AAPI umbrella. In Oakland, California in 2006, Samoan youth had the highest arrest rates of any racial/ethnic group at 140 per 1,000; other groups under the pan-ethnic AAPI label also had high arrest rates, with Cambodian youth at 63 per 1,000 and Vietnamese youth at 28 per 1,000.⁴⁹ In comparison, the arrest rate for Black youth in 2006 Oakland was 116 per 1,000—the second highest for any racial/ethnic group after Samoans.⁵⁰ For white youth, the rate was 13 per 1,000.⁵¹

These numbers, combined with the stories of Eddy and the others to follow, suggest that, while comprising a smaller number of the prison population, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are nevertheless mass incarcerated. This reality makes the exclusion of AAPIs in analyses of the prison industrial complex especially troublesome. It erases the lived experiences of criminalized AAPIs, obfuscates the scope of mass incarceration, perpetuates the model minority myth, and hinders collective solutions.

This Article identifies and addresses the invisibility of criminalized AAPIs in critical analyses of crime and carcerality. In particular, I intercalate AAPIs into ongoing, powerful critiques of the prison industrial complex, including developing abolitionist scholarship. I argue that the model minority myth, an anti-Black racial project, leads to the exclusion of AAPIs in both mainstream and critical studies of crime and carcerality. I start this intervention by identifying and critiquing a lacuna within Asian American Jurisprudence, specifically its neglect of criminalized AAPI voices. I demonstrate that AAPIs are mass incarcerated by highlighting the lived experiences of AAPI youth with the school-to-prison pipeline as well as by excavating the minimal amount of publicly available data on AAPI prison populations. Adopting multidisciplinary and multimodal methods, I identify and analyze distinct forms of racial profiling and racialized bullying that drive AAPI students out of schools and into prisons. I pay particular attention to the criminalization of various subgroups under the “AAPI” umbrella as whiz kids, gang members, or terrorists. In uncovering previously unexamined dimensions of the criminal system, I stress how the exclusion of AAPIs in critical discourse obscures the actual scale of the carceral state, erases complex intra- and interracial dynamics of power, marginalizes criminalized AAPIs, and concurrently reinforces anti-Blackness and other toxic ideologies. Accordingly, while this Article nominally transcends the traditional Black/white paradigm, it in fact reaffirms critical race, intersectional, and abolitionist analyses of Blackness and criminalization. It also directly critiques and links Asian American Jurisprudence to ongoing abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex. I conclude the Article with a proffer of abolitionist solutions. I propose Ethnic Studies as a remedy to the school-to-prison pipeline and issue a call, particularly to AAPI communities, to engage in critical coalition-building.

The Article is divided into five parts. Part I is this introduction. Part II provides an overview of AAPI communities and delves into the model minority myth. I analyze the model minority myth as the dominant force shaping the public perception of AAPIs in the United States. Borrowing from scholars of Asian American Studies and Asian American Jurisprudence, I evaluate the myth as an inaccurate and pernicious stereotype that glosses over rampant inequalities and erases certain issues faced by AAPI communities, such as mass incarceration. I also discuss the myth’s role in racial formations⁵² in the United States, particularly its role in perpetuating anti-Blackness and colorblindness. Other related concepts such as “Yellow Peril” and intersectional stereotypes, like the “Dragon Lady,” “Terrorist,” and the hypermasculinized, athletic Pacific Islander, are also studied.⁵³ Part II also elaborates on the link between Orientalism and the model minority myth, arguing that each perpetuates hypervisibility while concurrently erasing AAPI struggles.

Part III identifies and discusses the conspicuous absence—or lacuna—of criminalized AAPI experiences in Asian American Jurisprudence and beyond. I argue that the field’s inattention poses harmful implications that include the reinforcement of the model minority myth, the perpetuation of anti-Blackness, and the obstruction of a fuller critical understanding of the prison industrial complex. Throughout the section, I emphasize the importance of an intersectional, interconnected understanding of the prison industrial complex put forth by abolitionists, critical race theorists, and Black feminist scholars.

Part IV moves toward praxis. Part IV illustrates that AAPIs are indeed criminalized by the prison industrial complex vis-à-vis a critical reexamination of the school-to-prison pipeline. After providing a brief overview, I analyze traditional examinations of the school-to-prison pipeline as inadequate and exclusionary to AAPI youth. I then emphasize the unique forms of racial profiling of AAPI youth as “whiz kids,” “gangsters,” and “terrorists” that lead to criminalization. Part IV also investigates racialized bullying and mental health issues as other factors pushing AAPI youth out of schools and into the criminal system. Throughout Part IV, considerable attention is paid to specific subgroups under the all-encompassing umbrella “AAPI” to expose how reinforcing and even contradictory forms of racialization occur simultaneously to criminalize AAPI youth. Additionally, I map the experiences of criminalized AAPI youth onto the larger context of the prison industrial complex, showing the harms of excluding, and the boons of including, AAPIs in critical analyses of crime.

Part V synthesizes lessons learned from Parts I, II, III, and IV collectively. It outlines the dire material, social, and theoretical impact of erasure. I also propose solutions such as Ethnic Studies to explicitly tackle the distinct forms of discrimination AAPI youth face and further the fight to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Abolitionist principles heavily inform these suggestions. Part V closes the Article with a call for more meaningful coalitions between and among various groups that integrate a truly intersectional, interconnected, “both/and” analysis of race, power, and justice.

II. Who Are Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders?

AAPIs remain the fastest growing minority population in the United States.⁵⁴ They total 24.2 million individuals and comprise around six percent of the entire U.S. population.⁵⁵ The U.S. Census Bureau defines “Asian” as “[a] person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.”⁵⁶ A Pacific Islander, according to the Census Bureau, is “[a] person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.”⁵⁷

In reality, the pan-ethnic label covers over sixty-seven cultural, ethnic, religious, and national communities including Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Chinese, Filipino, Guamanian, Hmong, Indonesian, Iwo Jiman, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Malaysian, Maldivian, Marshallese, Micronesian, Native Hawaiian, Nepalese, Okinawan, Pakistani, Palauan, Singaporean, Samoan, Tahitian, Taiwanese, Thai, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and many others.⁵⁸ There are evidently multiple identities and subgroups— e.g., East Asians, Southeast Asians, South Asians, West Asians, Micronesians, Polynesians—under the pan-ethnic “AAPI.” Each of these identities and subgroups have shared and unique histories, patterns of immigration to the United States, and relationships with each other. Some arrive to the United States as refugees (mainly Southeast Asians); some arrive as migrant workers (like early Chinese and Filipino laborers in California).⁵⁹ Some are haunted by the shadow of U.S. colonialism and imperialism (e.g., Filipinos, Guamanians, American Samoans, Native Hawaiians), and some have been in conflict with each other (such as Japanese occupation of the Philippines and Korea at various points).⁶⁰ It is necessary to observe here that some Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders also fall under the AMEMSA label signifying Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian.⁶¹

AAPIs are also diverse in other ways. They are the most religiously and linguistically diverse group in the country.⁶² Around 66 percent of Asian Americans and 16 percent of Pacific Islanders are foreign-born, with AAPIs arriving to the United States as documented and undocumented immigrants, migrant workers, and refugees.⁶³ Nationwide, “there are an estimated 1,532,304 undocumented AAPIs” comprising 13.9 percent of the entire undocumented population in the country.⁶⁴ Despite these evident diversities, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are often painted with a singular, stereotypical stroke and cast as the “model minority.”

A. The Model Minority Myth

The designation of “model minority”⁶⁵ suggests that AAPIs are doing extremely well on their own in the United States in spite of being a minority group. Such success is attributed to their own hard work, thriftiness, innate intelligence, and law-abiding nature.⁶⁶ The designation is often supported through statistics citing high educational attainment rates and household incomes contrasted with low poverty and crime rates.⁶⁷ Indeed, aggregated and popularized data like those from the Pew Research Center’s The Rise of Asian Americans ⁶⁸ report seem to verify the model minority myth. According to the report, 49 percent of Asian Americans over the age of twenty-five have a bachelor’s degree or higher, versus 28 percent of the U.S. population and 31 percent of whites.⁶⁹ The report also indicates that Asian Americans’ median household income is $66,000, in comparison to $49,800 for the U.S. population and $54,000 for whites.⁷⁰

Mainstream media peddles these perceptions, too, with contemporary and tokenizing headlines.⁷¹ Since the 1960s, media coverage has reflected an enduring depiction of AAPIs as the model minority. The term “model minority” originates from sociologist William Petersen’s 1966 article in the New York Times Magazine titled “Success Story, Japanese American Style,” which was followed by similar articles like the U.S. News & World Report ’s “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.”⁷² These articles celebrated the success of certain Asian American groups— the Japanese and Chinese, respectively—and posited that they were faring exceptionally well despite facing histories of racial oppression such as Japanese internment and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.⁷³ The articles explicitly opined that Asians were prospering, unlike other “problem minorities” like African Americans, through their own impressive culture, discipline, intelligence, and work ethic.⁷⁴ Notably, these articles came out a year after the Moynihan Report, which “blamed African American culture and family structure for African Americans’ socio-economic problems.”⁷⁵ Equally important to note is that the 1960s were a time of immense racial justice activism, with Black communities leading the fight to secure civil rights.⁷⁶

Recognizing this historical context suggests that the model minority myth was fabricated to hinder the Civil Rights Movement and pit minority groups against one another.⁷⁷ Indeed, as multiple scholars indicate, at the heart of the model minority myth are principles of colorblindness, post-racialism, and meritocracy—that through hard work, thrift, and discipline, AAPIs transcend racism and attain profound successes.⁷⁸ Under these principles, the struggles of other minority groups are attributed to their own individual failings or characteristics rather than institutional and structural barriers. This “blame game” effectively delegitimizes demands for equality while hindering collective action.⁷⁹ During the Civil Rights Movement, the model minority myth helped cast Black communities as lazy, entitled, and belligerent, a direct contrast to the supposedly quiet, hardworking, and successful AAPIs.⁸⁰ In short, the “positive stereotype” of the model minority myth is a racist, xenophobic, anti-Black white supremacist project.

B. Historical Perspective: From Subhuman to Superhuman

The imagining of AAPIs as model minorities stands in stark contrast not only to perceptions of other communities of color, but also to historical depictions of AAPIs themselves. Throughout history, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been cast as the “Yellow Peril”—morally corrupt perpetual aliens who carried hidden agendas of conquest and threatened white racial purity and American democracy.⁸¹ Characterized as “Orientals” who ate vermin and “murder[ed] young girls to drink certain bodily fluids,”⁸² AAPIs were criminalized through various means including anti-miscegenation laws, immigration exclusion acts, and mass internment.⁸³ The Supreme Court itself subscribed to these views, and in some ways, cemented them.⁸⁴

The shift of AAPI perceptions from subhuman aliens to virtually superhuman model minorities further underlines the link between the model minority myth and white supremacy. The shift specifically reflected changing white supremacist interests. During World War II, for example, Japanese people were depicted as the ultimate embodiment of Yellow Peril—a characterization that informed their mass internment after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.⁸⁵ As Professor Neil Gotanda writes, “[t]he idea that many Japanese would ‘actually’ sympathize with Japan as a matter of ‘human nature’ was a simple extension of [the Yellow Peril stereotype] and was shared by many Americans.”⁸⁶ Yet in the decades after the War, Japanese people underwent a “gendered racial rehabilitation” that transformed them into model minorities in the public imagination.⁸⁷ This timely shift from Yellow Peril—which enabled mass internment—to “model minority” served to quell the Civil Rights Movement domestically.⁸⁸ But the shift in perception also helped justify American intervention in Asia to “save” it from communism and to promote “freedom” and capitalism.⁸⁹ Accordingly, the “miraculous metamorphosis”⁹⁰ from Yellow Peril to model minority not only reinforced racial oppression domestically but also pushed U.S. imperialist policies abroad.

While distinct, the Yellow Peril stereotype and the model minority myth reflect similar processes of Orientalism.⁹¹ Both cast AAPIs as inherent and perpetual foreigners—alien and exotic peoples who stand in opposition to whites and the West.⁹² And while the model minority myth is the dominant perception of AAPIs today, semblances of Yellow Peril persist and interact with the myth. Exaggerated perceptions of AAPI success today foster fear and hate within white communities who perceive AAPIs as social and economic threats.⁹³ This characterization of AAPIs as domestic and global competition mirrors Yellow Peril racial anxieties that have historically cast AAPIs as job-stealing and corrupting immigrants.⁹⁴ This is also the same view that informed lynchings and exclusionary policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act.⁹⁵

Recently, these racial anxieties have not only persisted but evolved. In the age of COVID-19, AAPIs are now considered even greater social, economic, and biopolitical threats. AAPIs are blamed for the coronavirus pandemic, which has been repeatedly called the “Kung Flu” and “China Plague” by a previously sitting President of the United States.⁹⁶ Hate crimes and other forms of racist violence against AAPIs, as during other pandemics, have surged in consequence.⁹⁷ Other contemporary examples of the interplay, perhaps fusion, of the Yellow Peril stereotype and model minority myth include the representation of AAPIs as “bumbling, squinty-eyed tourists, shrieking martial artists[,] opium-sniffing underworld lords,” or as evil geniuses.⁹⁸ These characterizations are more than just interrelated archetypes; they are factors that criminalize AAPIs today.⁹⁹

Beyond its compatibility with widespread white supremacist interests, the enduring nature of the model minority myth is attributable to its own self-sustaining nature. By stressing the innateness of AAPIs’ intelligence and diligence, the myth obscures the actual social, legal, and political mechanisms that uphold it. Few acknowledge the tie between the success of particular AAPI groups, like certain subsets of East and South Asians, to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA). The INA prioritized entry for highly educated and professional immigrants.¹⁰⁰ Thus, many Asian immigrants permitted to come to the United States arrived with high levels of capital including professional degrees and English proficiency—factors that typically forecast “upward” trajectories of immigrants upon arrival.¹⁰¹ The valuable capital brought by these immigrants is perhaps one of the many factors that explain the oft-cited, bloated statistics suggesting extreme success of AAPIs.¹⁰² In other words, it makes sense that AAPI communities may have higher educational levels, for example, because the very immigration policies that allow their entry require such credentials.

Nevertheless, most data highlighting the supposed success of AAPIs as a group can easily be disproven upon interrogation. For example, when factors such as the number of hours worked and total number of workers per household—typically higher for immigrant communities¹⁰³— are considered, the average household income for AAPIs plummets compared to whites.¹⁰⁴ Similarly, when data about AAPIs is disaggregated, the supposition that they are all prospering crumbles.¹⁰⁵ Poverty rates for certain communities under the label are devastatingly high. From 2006 to 2010, 27 percent of Hmong, 21.1 percent of Bangladeshi, 18.9 percent of Tongan, 18.8 percent of Cambodian, and around 16 percent of Samoan and Pakistani people lived in poverty.¹⁰⁶ So did about 14 percent of Korean, Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese people, compared to only 9.6 percent of whites.¹⁰⁷ AAPIs are also one of the fastest growing poverty populations since the Great Recession.¹⁰⁸ Similar troubling trends exist for educational attainment levels. In 2017, 9.1 percent of Asian Americans and 10.7 percent of Pacific Islanders over the age of 25 did not have a high school degree.¹⁰⁹ In comparison, only 5.9 percent of whites over the age of 25 did not.¹¹⁰

These rates reflect the various forms of structural inequality rendered invisible by the “positive” stereotype of the model minority myth. And since “model minorities are purportedly self-reliant, thereby needing little support from the state in terms of social welfare or minority-targeted initiatives,”¹¹¹ struggling AAPIs often suffer in silence. Put alternatively, the myth makes it almost impossible to imagine that problems like AAPI poverty exist in the first place. It not only masks issues plaguing AAPI communities but impedes the creation of necessary supports and services that could address, or even prevent, such issues in the first place. This cycle of silence and suffering is particularly salient for criminalized AAPIs who are often entirely absent from discussion. In this way, the model minority myth obscures the struggles of AAPIs while also rendering AAPIs hypervisible as supposedly successful minorities. “[T]he paradoxical result is that visibility is heightened but our vision is obscured: We see more, but understand less.”¹¹²

By dehumanizing and tokenizing AAPIs as silent and law-abiding superhumans who are highly intelligent and hardworking, the model minority image also creates a host of psychosocial problems for AAPIs.¹¹³ Professor Daya Sandhu explains:

Several mental health concerns and psychological afflictions, such as threats to cultural identity, powerlessness, feelings of marginality, loneliness, hostility and perceived alienation and discrimination remain unredressed and hidden under the veneer of the model minority myth. Both social and psychological forces to conform to the model minority stereotype place an inordinate amount of pressure on [AAPIs].¹¹⁴

C. Other Related and Intersectional Perceptions

Although the model minority myth pervades the imaginations of both institutions and individuals today, it is not the sole force shaping the perception and experiences of AAPIs. This is especially true given intersectionality.¹¹⁵ Other distinct, yet related, stereotypes persist. Asian women, for instance, are often fetishized and portrayed as “Lotus Blossoms”— docile, submissive, and even self-sacrificing—or as “Dragon Ladies”— Yellow Peril-informed seductresses who use their “‘Oriental’ femininity, associated with seduction and danger” to take advantage of men.¹¹⁶ Similar racial and gendered views undergird imaginations of AAPI women as “China Dolls,” geishas, and “mail-order brides.”¹¹⁷ All these representations hypersexualize and subject AAPI women to dehumanization and violence.¹¹⁸

There is also the stereotype of the “Tiger Mom,” which refers to extremely involved Asian, usually Chinese, mothers focused on the academic success of their children.¹¹⁹ The Tiger Mom stereotype “revives a cultural anxiety among many Americans regarding Asian economic and resource competition.”¹²⁰ Tiger Moms could be seen as a reconfiguration of the Dragon Lady and the model minority trope, Orientalizing and casting AAPI mothers as “excessively focused on discipline and achievement, an excess that marks them as cultural and gender deviants, i.e., as not proper American mothers.”¹²¹ Meanwhile, when not completely absent or dismissed in the public imagination, Pacific Islander women are exoticized as the “iconic swaying hula girl” or overly “sensual and freespirited.”¹²²

Unique Orientalizing stereotypes also apply to AAPI men. In contrast to stereotypes of Black hypermasculinity, Asian American men today are typified as asexual, emasculated, and nerdy model minorities.¹²³ This was not always the case, however.¹²⁴ AAPI men were hypermasculinized and cast as sexual predators in the late 1800s and early 1900s.¹²⁵ Akin to Black men, Filipinos, for instance, were perceived as men with “unbridled sexual passions” who preyed on white women, therefore posing a threat to white American society and triggering nativist and exclusionist backlash.¹²⁶ Contemporarily, Pacific Islanders are likewise hypermasculinized. They are mainly represented as large, athletic, but also slow, lazy, simple-minded islanders.¹²⁷ Pacific Islander men are often especially cast as “larger-than-life personas of both noble chiefs and crazed wildmen” in sports entertainment such as wrestling and football.¹²⁸ They are also stereotyped as obese and violent gang members.¹²⁹

Crucial to AAPI racialization is also the “inconsistent” and multilayered stereotype of South and Southwest Asians as “terrorists.”¹³⁰ As critical race theorists underline, the tragedy of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror weaved an additional racial narrative that casts “anyone who looked vaguely ‘Arab’”—which can include peoples from West Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East—as enemies of the nation.¹³¹ This racialization, in part, invokes Orientalist and Yellow Peril anxieties of “Japanese saboteurs or Chinese spies.”¹³² However, as Professor Leti Volpp notes:

The category of those who appear “Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim,” is socially constructed, like all racial categories, and heterogeneous. Persons of many different races and religions have been attacked as presumably appearing “Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.” South Asians, in particular, along with Arabs and persons of Middle Eastern descent, have been subject to attack, although Latinos and African Americans have also been so identified. The category uses the religious identification, “Muslim,” as a racial signifier. Persons have been attacked since they “appear Muslim,” which, of course, makes no sense, since Muslims can be of any race.¹³³

For example, South Asians who are not Muslim but are of the Sikh faith have nonetheless borne “the brunt of discriminatory national security policies and selective immigration enforcement.”¹³⁴ They have also been the targets of horrific hate crimes since 9/11.¹³⁵ An example is the shooting of two Asian Indians in Olathe, Kansas in February 2017, where the shooter “reportedly yelled ‘get out of my country’ and thought his victims were ‘Middle Eastern.’”¹³⁶

Like the model minority myth that subsumes AAPI perceptions, the above stereotypes are interlocking and widespread. And while their pervasiveness may suggest otherwise, these harmful narratives do not go unchallenged. Artists, activists, and many others constantly contest these perceptions. In the legal academy, Asian American Jurisprudence scholars strive to boldly assert a collective AAPI identity, generate terrain for paradigm-shifting discourse, and effect racial justice and powerful coalitions.¹³⁷

III. The Critical Lacuna of AAPI Criminalization

Asian American Jurisprudence is not simply a “discrete doctrine or theory, but a space and locale in legal studies for identity, interrogation, and praxis.”¹³⁸ The field’s focus on identity stems from its “communitybased subject position.”¹³⁹ Interrogation, meanwhile, “examines [AAPIs’] multiple histories and creates larger narratives,” and the theme of praxis integrates activism and scholarship.¹⁴⁰

Despite the expansive and powerful depths of the field, Asian American Jurisprudence only contests the prison industrial complex in limited ways.¹⁴¹ This absence of critical analyses of AAPI criminalization is particularly concerning given the discipline’s roots in critical legal studies and critical race theory.¹⁴² Both critical legal studies and critical race theory examine law and liberalism as forces of rampant social stratification and injustice.¹⁴³ Critical race theory, in particular, departs from critical legal studies significantly and stresses the epistemological power—and necessity—of the subjectivity of marginalized peoples as “grassroots philosophers.”¹⁴⁴ As Professor Mari Matsuda writes, those

who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen. Looking to the bottom— adopting the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise—can assist critical scholars in the task of fathoming the phenomenology of law and defining the elements of justice.¹⁴⁵ Few critical race theorists, if any, would claim that criminalized

people, including AAPI prisoners, have little to say about the “falsity of the liberal promise” and racial subordination. Nevertheless, the voices and experiences of criminalized AAPIs, as in other critical spheres, are rarely found in Asian American Jurisprudence.¹⁴⁶ This absence poses several troubling consequences, including rendering critical understandings of the entire carceral system, as well as the very nature of structural inequalities, incomplete.

A. The Pitfalls of Erasure

Asian American Jurisprudence’s silence surrounding the experiences of criminalized AAPIs inadvertently reinforces the model minority myth itself. Because the model minority myth is so capacious and pervasive, even the unintentional neglect of AAPI criminalization can be weaponized as additional evidence that AAPIs are indeed prosperous, lawabiding model minorities who are not impacted by the engines of mass incarceration.¹⁴⁷ The silence surrounding the topic also perpetuates the invisibility or erasure of AAPIs in broader scholarship and social justice advocacy. Additionally, the specific erasure of criminalized AAPIs is especially troubling given that they are often already at the margins of society, being, for instance, poor and of liminal legal status.¹⁴⁸

Relatedly, the lack of focus on criminalized AAPIs implies an aversion to discussing issues of criminality or “wrongdoing” within the communities. This absence of critical analyses of AAPI criminalization reflects a potential internalization¹⁴⁹ of the model minority myth—a problematic desire to be the “good,” law-abiding minority.¹⁵⁰ The inevitable and damaging conclusion of such a distinction is that there are “bad” minority groups—namely Hispanic and, especially, Black communities.¹⁵¹

The anti-Black repercussions stemming from the absence of critical analyses of AAPI carcerality do not end there. In an attempt to “transcend the Black/white paradigm,” alongside its suggestion that AAPIs are not part of the criminal system except as “illegal” immigrants or gang members, Asian American Jurisprudence incidentally casts and (dis)engages mass incarceration as a separate racial justice issue—namely, a “Black issue.” This view problematically reinforces the equation of crime with Blackness. It also reflects the model minoritarian desire to be in closer proximity to whiteness and, particularly, to be “expediently non- Black.”¹⁵²

Viewing mass incarceration as solely a Black issue obscures the intra- and interracial dynamics of the prison industrial complex. It exempts from critical examination the role of AAPI identities, peoples, experiences, and histories in maintaining—as well as resisting—mass incarceration. The Jurisprudence’s disengagement of mass incarceration leaves critical questions unanswered—and unasked. To what extent are AAPIs implicated in the criminal system? How are AAPIs complicit in the prison industrial complex? How and why does their criminalization differ or mirror the criminalization of Black people and other communities of color? In foreclosing these interrogations, Asian American Jurisprudence’s repeated calls for coalitions can thus ring hollow as the discipline neglects to address how AAPIs themselves have “undermined interracial cooperation,” such as through their own investment in anti-Blackness.¹⁵³ Recent examples include the silence and complicity of AAPI communities in the killings of Akai Gurley and George Floyd, both of which involved the actions of AAPI police officers.¹⁵⁴

To view mass incarceration as simply a “Black issue” also divorces Asian American Jurisprudence from critical race theory’s paradigmatic imperative of intersectionality. Intersectionality, coined by pioneering critical race theorist Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, commonly “refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation.”¹⁵⁵ And while some have reduced intersectionality to a static, identitarian, and additive double jeopardy theory,¹⁵⁶ intersectionality persists as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.”¹⁵⁷ Intersectionality reveals that oppressions and identities are dynamic and “contextually constituted.”¹⁵⁸

Accordingly, an intersectional framework necessitates the cognizance that AAPI and Black public identities¹⁵⁹ are interconnected. It reframes static dichotomous understandings of oppression—e.g., that AAPIs are diligent and Black people lazy—as dynamic, dialogic processes. In short, the model minority myth informs and furthers anti-Blackness, just as anti-Blackness shapes and reinforces the model minority myth— though each operate and effectuate harm in fundamentally distinct ways in different contexts. It follows that the criminalization of AAPIs (or the supposed lack thereof) is similarly interlocked with the hypercriminalization of Black communities, just as constructs like race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability also all simultaneously shape processes and ideas of criminality.¹⁶⁰ In this light, the lacuna left by Asian American Jurisprudence’s neglect of criminalized AAPIs impedes a critical intervention of oppression, obstructing how intersecting oppressions are actually organized and how power operates distinctly on “structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal” levels.¹⁶¹

B. Intersectionality and the Prison Industrial Complex

More specifically, the lack of intersectional critique renders the interconnectedness of mass incarceration with other systems invisible.¹⁶² As abolitionists such as Professors Angela Davis and Dorothy Roberts have repeatedly stressed, mass incarceration is not merely about criminal punishment but also of unequal economic, social, and political systems, all of which form the “prison industrial complex.”¹⁶³ Contemporarily, these systems include institutions and practices like “the wage system, animal and earth exploitation, [and] racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence.”¹⁶⁴ For example, the “prison-building boom” in California during the 1980s to the 2000s, despite falling crime rates, was a “response to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity.”¹⁶⁵ The rush to build prisons in California embodied the convergence of pressures from agricultural markets, austerity measures, police unions, and other social forces— each of which implicated its own set of intersectional issues.¹⁶⁶ Additionally, the prison industrial complex interlocks with other public institutions such as schools to expand the carceral state:

Government agencies don’t make profits; instead, they need revenue. State agencies must compete for this revenue . . . . Under austerity, the social-welfare function shrinks; the agencies that receive the money are the police, firefighters and corrections. So other agencies start to copy what the police do: The education department, for instance, learns that it can receive money for metal detectors much more easily than it can for other kinds of facility upgrades. And prisons can access funds that traditionally went elsewhere — for example, money goes to county jails and state prisons for “mental health services” rather than into public health generally.¹⁶⁷

Thus, the prison industrial complex today is a “logic and method of dominance [that] is not reducible to the particular institutional form of jails, prisons, detention centers, and other such brick-and-mortar incarcerating facilities.”¹⁶⁸ Undoubtedly, this was also true historically. As Black feminist abolitionists emphasize, for example, the American criminal punishment system has roots in various legal, physical, and cultural aspects of “racialized chattel slavery.”¹⁶⁹ Anti-Black racism is evidently at the core of what animated—and animates—the mechanisms of the U.S. criminal system.

Nevertheless, as an intersectional framework dictates, there are other ideologies and systems that interlock and consequently inform the prison industrial complex. In the words of Professor Davis, while “the prison reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in clandestine ways,” it is clear that

there are other racialized histories that have affected the development of the U.S. punishment system as well—the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and [AAPIs]. These racisms congeal and combine in the prison. Because we are so accustomed to talking about race in terms of black and white, we often fail to recognize and contest expressions of racism that target people of color who are not black.¹⁷⁰

In this light, Asian American Jurisprudence’s inattention to AAPI criminalization erases the communities’ experience of oppression, which, ironically, is exactly the field’s critique of the Black/white paradigm. Its inattention also mirrors the continued erasure of criminalized AAPIs in other critical fields such as multiracial and feminist criminologies. The resulting lacuna excludes from analysis historical and contemporary anti- AAPI forces interconnected with criminalization. Otherwise stated, the erasure of criminalized AAPIs limits our understanding—and perhaps prevents us from even posing the question—of precisely how anti-AAPI oppression has shaped and continues to shape criminalization. And this, in turn, obfuscates the actual scope, history, and impact of the criminal system while erasing important intersectional dynamics between and among various groups.

To illustrate, consider the relative silence surrounding the criminalization of AAPI migrants in California during the twentieth century. In the early 1900s South Asian men who congregated together in poor neighborhoods and shared resources with each other were stereotyped as “Hindu Sodomites” corrupting notions of “normative American masculinity.”¹⁷¹ They were consequently subjected to surveillance and criminalization under vagrancy, sodomy, and male prostitution laws.¹⁷² Similarly, police also subjected Filipino farmworkers who frequented taxi dance halls in the 1920s and 1930s to scrutiny and violence.¹⁷³ These farmworkers flocked to the dance halls after laboring in dehumanizing conditions all day “in search of the proverbial wine, women, and song.”¹⁷⁴ At the halls, they used their meager wages to dance with working-class white women.¹⁷⁵ These interactions ultimately led to mass protest and police raids.¹⁷⁶ They also led to local efforts to establish “exclusionist policies based on the so-called unbridled sexual passions of Filipinos,”¹⁷⁷ even though Filipinos themselves were American nationals at the time as a result of U.S. colonization.¹⁷⁸

Manifest in these histories is the interconnectedness of criminalization with immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, as well as the interplay of race, class, gender, and sexuality. What thus follows from the scholarly silence surrounding these histories is the erasure of these connections and cognizance of precisely how these systems have specifically targeted and impacted AAPIs. The silence also inhibits analysis drawing connections between the very imagination of AAPIs as predatory deviants with other racialized perceptions, such as ones informed by anti- Blackness. Indeed, the silence misses how many “racial qualities previously assigned to blacks quickly became” AAPI characteristics in the early twentieth century,¹⁷⁹ such as Filipino masculinity being deemed a similar threat to white racial purity as Black masculinity was¹⁸⁰ or how other AAPIs like the Chinese were caricatured in minstrel shows as having dark skin, thick lips, and an inhuman capacity to work.¹⁸¹

Today, the inattention to the criminalization of AAPIs leads to similar types of erasure. It silences the stories of Eddy and other criminalized AAPIs, including those currently incarcerated. It also exempts from examination the ways in which the prison industrial complex specifically targets and impacts AAPIs today—just as it continues to effectuate harm on various other communities in different ways. Critically, because this inattention leaves the anti-AAPI dimensions of the prison industrial complex unexamined, it also leaves the specific issues causing AAPI’s criminalization unaddressed. Typical solutions offered by both mainstream and critical advocates, while likely beneficial overall, are thus limited in scope.¹⁸² They do not address the unique factors that criminalize AAPIs.

IV. The Criminalization of AAPI Youth

The resulting inability to address the unique factors criminalizing AAPIs is especially problematic in the context of schools, often examined as powerful sites of socialization and criminalization.¹⁸³ For most AAPI youth, particularly those with immigrant backgrounds, schools are loci for learning and interacting with dominant American norms.¹⁸⁴ They are also sites of contestation where identities play significant, central roles.¹⁸⁵ To criminalized AAPIs like Eddy, schools were also sites of discrimination and criminalization. Yet the experiences of AAPIs are scantly discussed in the robust scholarship and advocacy around schooling and criminalization, including critical works on the “school-to-prison pipeline.”¹⁸⁶

A. The School-to-Prison Pipeline and Zero Tolerance Policies

The school-to-prison pipeline drives out students from schools and pushes them into prison, emphasizing a focus on incarceration over education.¹⁸⁷ Due to the pipeline’s nefarious scope, many have rightfully examined and attempted to disrupt it.¹⁸⁸ Today, the pipeline is generally understood as disproportionately criminalizing students from marginalized backgrounds, typically of poor, disabled, Black, and/or Latinx identities—with girls increasingly impacted.¹⁸⁹ The schools these students attend are typically de facto segregated, heavily underfunded, and characterized by “overcrowded classrooms . . . , a lack of effective teachers and school leaders, and insufficient funds for ‘extras’ such as counselors, special education services and even textbooks” which create hostile environments for learning and worsen a myriad of criminalizing factors.¹⁹⁰ These factors include zero-tolerance and punitive policies, increased police presence, racial profiling, and emphases on high-stakes testing.¹⁹¹

Zero tolerance policies often “provide the direct mechanism by which students are removed from school by suspension/expulsion, pushed toward dropping out, charged in juvenile court, and routed into the prison pipeline.”¹⁹² The term refers to how “a harsh predefined mandatory consequence is applied to a violation of school rules without regard to the seriousness of the behavior, mitigating circumstances, or the situational context.”¹⁹³ Zero tolerance policies have resulted in exorbitantly high rates of suspensions and arrests in schools, with some states’ number of suspensions exceeding 10 percent of the enrolled student population.¹⁹⁴ Combined with increased police presence at schools, these policies have also led to extreme punishments: a kindergartener arrested for throwing a tantrum, a student arrested for a flawed science project, and another for playing a song aloud from a cellphone.¹⁹⁵

Beyond their application to disciplinary behavior, zero tolerance policies also intertwine with academic disengagement or “failure.”¹⁹⁶ Research shows that academic performance is a powerful predictor for behavior and vice versa.¹⁹⁷ Struggling students can “act out,” which can trigger zero tolerance policies, while suspensions and expulsions exacerbate poor academic performance by disrupting education.¹⁹⁸ Further, the dominant emphasis on standardization and “test-driven accountability regimes” provide perverse pressures and “incentives for schools to push out low-performing students.”¹⁹⁹ “[I]f a student acts up in class, it is no longer in educators’ self-interest to address it by assessing the student’s unmet needs or treating the incident as a ‘teachable moment.’”²⁰⁰ It becomes “much easier and more ‘efficient’ to simply remove the child from class through punitive disciplinary measures and focus on the remaining students. As a result, the practice of pushing struggling students out of school to boost test scores has become quite common.”²⁰¹ Accordingly, Winter 2021] AAPIs & Prison Industrial Complex 481

while schools may not directly expel students due to poor academic performance, zero tolerance allows them to expel students for misbehavior stemming from academic struggles that are often caused by myriad external factors.²⁰²

The rise of zero tolerance policies stems from racialized conceptions of crime during the War on Drugs that depicted Black Americans as supposedly bulletproof super predators.²⁰³ Together with concerns arising from popularized coverage of the Columbine shooting, schools militarized, deploying law enforcement officers, security cameras, and metal detectors on campus.²⁰⁴ Data reflects the devastating results of the policies.²⁰⁵ The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights found that Black students are “suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students.”²⁰⁶ “American Indian and Native-Alaskan students are also disproportionately suspended and expelled, representing less than 1 percent of the student population but 2 percent of out-ofschool suspensions and 3 percent of expulsions.”²⁰⁷ Meanwhile, Black girls are suspended at a rate higher than any other racial group and most boys, and students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended from school, with one out of four boys of color with disabilities and nearly one in five girls of color with disabilities receiving out of school suspensions.²⁰⁸ Additionally, 70 percent of students referred to law enforcement in schools are Black or Latinx, and both groups are “twice as likely to not graduate high school as whites.”²⁰⁹ Notably, there is little to no reference to AAPI students, reflecting their pervasive erasure in informational systems and advocacy.²¹⁰

Considered with the reality that even one out-of-school suspension can double a student’s risk of dropping out,²¹¹ that drop-outs are three and a half times more likely to be arrested than high school graduates, and that 68 percent of incarcerated men across the country are without a high school diploma,²¹² these statistics reveal the serious scope and impact of the school-to-prison pipeline on individuals and communities physically, emotionally, economically, and socially. Summarily put, the pipeline hurts us all:

We all lose out in multiple ways. We lose out economically because people who are poorly educated earn less, pay less in taxes and need more services. They will also more likely end up in prison. But we lose out in other ways that are not obvious. We can’t help but think of the art that is not created, the entrepreneurial ideas that may never reach the drawing board, the classrooms these Americans will never lead, the discoveries they’ll never make. Our failure to educate some groups [of] children as well as others tear at the moral fabric of the nation.²¹³

B. Complicating the Metaphor and “Reframing” the Pipeline

While the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor is helpful in many respects, it improperly implies that the process of criminalizing students is unidirectional or linear.²¹⁴ It implies that there is a specific origin point— schools—and a terminal location—prison—when instead the reality is that a complex “system or web” of “policies and social practices, in and out of schools, punitive and non-punitive in nature” all work in tandem to criminalize youth.²¹⁵ For example, Professor Alicia Pantoja, in criticizing the Black/white emphasis on the pipeline, observes that the pipeline functions more as a web for other youth, such as Latinx students.²¹⁶ She notes that “the intersection and multiplicity of oppressive immigration, mass incarceration and schooling systems, among other factors, shape the process and outcomes of Latin@s’ criminalization.”²¹⁷ In other words, there are many other points or “stops” on the pipeline or web: immigration detention centers, deportation, poverty, mental health issues, abuse, and others.

The criminalization of AAPI students likewise involves these factors.²¹⁸ Issues of immigration, language access, mental health care, poverty, and educational inequality, to name a few, converge to criminalize AAPI youth. Yet the serious nature of each of these issues, as well as their interconnectedness, is not enough to bring to light the struggles of criminalized AAPI youth. Even critical scholars like Professor Pantoja who criticize the “Black/white dyad”—akin to scholars of Asian American Jurisprudence—pay little heed to the plight of criminalized AAPIs. But as Eddy’s story and data shows, AAPIs are subjected to criminalization.²¹⁹ And despite data on criminalized AAPIs being scarce, with data on criminalized AAPI youth being scarcer and more dated, what is available does underline that AAPIs are impacted by the prison industrial complex.

C. Locating AAPI Youth on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

In 2004, while the arrests of white, Black, and Native American youths decreased nationwide, the arrests of young AAPIs increased by 11.4 percent.²²⁰ In California, where high percentages of AAPIs reside and subsequently where more data is available, the incarceration of young AAPIs is notable. Reports conducted by the National Center on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) in 2001 and 2006 found that in San Francisco County, “Samoan and Vietnamese youth have some of the highest rates of arrest of any ethnic group.”²²¹ In 2006 Oakland, Samoan youth had the highest arrest rates of any racial/ethnic group in the city at 140 per 1,000.²²² Southeast Asian youth also suffered disproportional arrest rates in Oakland: Cambodian youth at 63 per 1,000, Laotian youth at 52 per 1,000, and Vietnamese youth at 28 per 1,000.²²³ Meanwhile, the arrest rate of white youth in Oakland in 2006 was only 13 per 1,000.²²⁴ Additionally, in Oakland, from 1990 to 2006, “Laotian youth had among the greatest increases in arrest rates, at times jumping almost 50% in one year (1997 to 1998).”²²⁵ Moreover, “Laotian youth represented almost half of AAPI arrests in Oakland, yet only 22% of the entire AAPI population.”²²⁶

AAPI youth also face disproportionate and distinct forms of criminalization. In Alameda County in California, for instance, Southeast Asians have high rates of recidivism, with 40 percent of Southeast Asians arrested in Oakland “committing crimes of ‘greater seriousness’ within two years.”²²⁷ Among criminalized youth who have adjudication hearings, AAPIs were the most likely to “undergo institutional placement.”²²⁸ AAPIs are also harshly criminalized in immigration contexts:

Closely tied to the rise of mass incarceration is the growth of immigration detention and deportation. Deportations have increased for AAPIs overall, and Southeast Asian Americans in particular. Since 1998, at least 15,000 Southeast Asian Americans from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have received final orders of deportation, despite many arriving to the United States with refugee status and obtaining a green card. Furthermore, more than 12,000 of the final orders of deportation were based on old criminal records rather than current offenses. Due to stringent immigration policies enacted in 1996, Southeast Asian American communities are three to four times more likely to be deported for old convictions, compared to other immigrant communities.²²⁹

Like the lacuna found in Asian American Jurisprudence, the limited data on AAPI youth and the school-to-prison pipeline highlight important sociopolitical points. It reflects the adherence of institutions, advocates, and scholars to the model minority myth as well as a tendency to overlook smaller populations. Both this adherence and tendency have dire consequences that include maintaining the myth itself and erasing urgent needs of the communities. And even though criminalized AAPI youth do occupy a much smaller place on the pipeline (and are invisible in analyses), their experiences, struggles, and needs are nevertheless valid, existent, and evidence of the evils of the prison industrial complex. Consequently, inclusion and investigation of their experiences illuminate unaddressed and unidentified elements of the pipeline. They also reveal the specific ways that the pipeline subjugates young AAPIs and provide a more nuanced image of the interlocking nature of criminalization.

Critically, the inclusion of AAPIs in studies of the pipeline (and criminalization more broadly) here, and hopefully elsewhere, should not detract from the significant contributions to current understandings and critiques of the pipeline—and carcerality. Nor should their inclusion decenter the experiences of Latinx and especially Black youth, whose subjugation to the pipeline remains of the utmost “saliency.”²³⁰ Rather, the goal of including the experiences of AAPI youth is to expand existing important, yet limited analyses of the pipeline. To do so is to shy away from the unintersectional, “additive frameworks” of conceptualizing systemic oppression.²³¹ Because intersectionality enables a complex “both/and” analysis, rather than simply an “either/or” one,²³² analysis of the prison industrial complex as anti-AAPI should therefore not preclude analysis that it is also intrinsically anti-Black. In other words, the prison industrial complex is anti-AAPI and still fundamentally anti-Black. Put another way, just as the model minority myth and anti-Blackness “congeal” and mutually reinforce each other, so do the distinct forms of criminalization targeting AAPIs and Black communities.²³³ Analysis of how AAPI youth are particularly impacted by the pipeline therefore furthers a more complete and intersectional understanding of the prison industrial complex as well as oppression more generally.

D. The Racial Profiling and Criminalization of AAPI Youth

Typical factors that criminalize students include zero tolerance policies, militarization and police presence in schools, racial profiling, and high-stakes testing and academic disengagement.²³⁴ However, given the absence of AAPI youth in critical examinations of the pipeline, these factors are only understood in relation to Black and Latinx youth. The result is the occlusion of the factors’ specific impact on AAPI youth and consequently potential ways to address them.

Take racial profiling in schools. Numerous advocates establish that Black and Latinx students are often racially profiled as deviant and criminal and are therefore disciplined more harshly.²³⁵ Research shows that 70 percent of students referred to law enforcement in schools are Black or Latinx.²³⁶ In particular, Black students are subjected to extremely disproportionate discipline. In North Carolina, for example, “Black students were suspended eight times higher for cell phone use, six times higher for dress code violations, two times higher for disruptive behavior and 10 times higher for displays of affection” than white students.²³⁷

Racial profiling is a relatively well-documented contributing factor to the incarceration of numerous Black and Latinx children.²³⁸ However, the racial profiling of AAPI students is rarely studied, which is particularly problematic given that AAPI students are also profiled—in unique ways, in fact. These varying forms of racial profiling trigger or exacerbate academic disengagement, mental health issues, and cultural alienation. In conjunction with zero tolerance policies and overpolicing, these forms of racial profiling all ultimately drive students into the criminal system.

1. Racial Profiling of AAPI Students as “Whiz Kids” and Academic

Disengagement.

One potential factor pushing AAPI youths toward the criminal system is their depiction as “whiz kids,” a stereotype developed from the model minority myth.²³⁹ In Professor Guofang Li’s words, AAPI students, specifically East and South Asian youth are frequently

described as intelligent, industrious, enduring, obedient, and highly successful, and have been constructed as “academic nerds,” “high achievers” who are “joyfully” initiated into North American life and English literacy practices. These model minority images are based on reports of Asian students’ high test scores in mathematics and SAT, and higher grade point average in high school in comparison with other minority groups such as African and Hispanic students in the U.S., and Aboriginal students in Canada. In recent years, there are also reports that Asians are outdoing whites in test scores, educational attainment, and family income. These images are further reinforced by reports of only success stories in research literature and in the media.²⁴⁰ Like the model minority myth itself, the stereotype of the “whiz

kid” dates back from media representations and persists today.²⁴¹ These include Time ’s August 31, 1987 issue cover captioned “Those²⁴² Asian- American Whiz Kids” to a New York Times Sunday Review column in October 2015 entitled “The Asian Advantage,” which proclaimed that “it’s no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American schools, and even in American society as a whole.”²⁴³ The representations perpetuate the profiling of AAPI students as geniuses. In the classroom, these stereotypes have led teachers to have higher expectations for AAPI students in comparison to other groups of students.²⁴⁴

Not only is the hegemonic perception of AAPI students as whiz kids inaccurate—for example, a national educational assessment report card for eight graders from 1998 to 2003 specified that for some “states such as Hawaii and Minnesota, the percentage of Asian American/Pacific Islanders at or above basic level in reading can be as low as 45% to 55%” and “in terms of mathematics, in some states (e.g., Hawaii), the percentage of Asian Pacific Islander students who are below basic level can be as high as 46%”²⁴⁵—but it is also harmful for AAPI students, specifically struggling ones and/or those who have limited proficiency in English. For example, “although 73% [of] Asian Pacific eighth graders were language minorities, only 27% were recognized as such by their teachers.”²⁴⁶ Consequently, countless students did not receive adequate—or, in many cases, any—support to succeed academically.²⁴⁷ Considered in light of the fact that one in four AAPI students have limited proficiency in English and/or live in a linguistically isolated household,²⁴⁸ the whiz kid stereotype impedes the educational experiences of numerous AAPI students.

Similarly to how the model minority myth masks the struggles of AAPIs, the needs of struggling AAPI students often become neglected since teachers believe that AAPI students are naturally smart.²⁴⁹ In other words, teachers’ beliefs grounded in the whiz kid stereotype keep them from “recognizing the instructional needs and the psychological and emotional concerns of many underachieving [AAPI] students.”²⁵⁰ As a result, these students do not receive the support they require to succeed, leading to poor academic performance and academic disengagement, which can be fatal under zero tolerance regimes. These students can fail or drop out, increasing the probability of entanglement with the criminal system. Likewise, academic disengagement can also cause truancy and delinquency.²⁵¹ Poor academic performance, for example, “strongly predicted physical fighting” in schools for Southeast Asian students.²⁵²

Academic disengagement because of limited support was certainly a factor for students like Eddy from the Introduction. Eddy struggled in school and felt bored, unable to connect to class material primarily due to a language barrier.²⁵³ Uninterested in and pessimistic about school, he began to skip class and spent time at the local playground instead.²⁵⁴ There, he met other truant students like Dennis Chan.²⁵⁵ Dennis eventually dared Eddy to commit crimes such as petty theft, which began to entangle Eddy in the criminal system.²⁵⁶ Dennis also became a codefendant in the kidnapping-robbery case that resulted in Eddy’s life imprisonment sentence.²⁵⁷

While the whiz kid perception predominantly impacts East Asians, like Eddy, and other light-skinned AAPIs, the stereotype nevertheless impacts everyone under the AAPI umbrella. This is because on a macro level, schools, policymakers, and other stakeholders all group AAPIs together, which blankets the inequalities and struggles of other AAPI students. For instance, Teli Hafoka, daughter to two Tongan working class immigrant parents, stated that school officials “left her completely alone” because they assumed she was Asian and therefore did not require assistance or support in school.²⁵⁸ They also did not provide her with “any information about college or scholarships . . . . Hafoka didn’t take the SAT—no one told her to—and she made it one year in junior college before she dropped out. That was better than some of her siblings, who had seriously struggled in high school. One brother was in jail.”²⁵⁹ To school officials, Teli was essentially Asian and therefore a whiz kid who did not need help.

The very profiling of AAPI youth as whiz kids also contributes to the pernicious cycle of suffering in silence, by themselves. Because they are perceived as the smart model minorities, AAPI youths feel pressure to “live up” to the heightened expectations of their teachers—who also apply additional pressure—and therefore hesitate to ask for help.²⁶⁰ Furthermore, the perception of AAPI youth as whiz kids and good students can cause teachers to assume that they have adequate parental support at home.²⁶¹ This presumption often results in teachers and school officials failing to contact parents regarding students’ needs.²⁶² In fact, “compared to Black and Latino parents, teachers were less likely to contact immigrant Asian parents about academic and behavioral struggles.”²⁶³ Additionally, “only 5 percent of math teachers and 9 percent of English teachers communicated with parents of first- and second-generation Asian students about misbehavior.”²⁶⁴ Further, less than 5 percent of English teachers contacted parents of first-generation Asian students who rarely did homework.²⁶⁵

This low and disproportionate rate of parental contact may be because students are assumed to be doing well. It may also be because teachers assume that students’ parents are smart and educated—a result of the model minority myth—or that the parents are actively, even overly involved and invested in students’ education, an assumption also rooted in the model minority myth and manifest in the “Tiger Mom” trope.²⁶⁶ Regardless, these heightened expectations and discriminating assumptions all reinforce the suffering of struggling AAPI students and augment the prospects of academic disengagement, which can lead to students leaving school and getting involved with the criminal system.²⁶⁷ Teachers, viewing struggling AAPI students as deviating from the “norm” of the whiz kid, may also subject them to discipline and harsher punishment.²⁶⁸

The racial profiling of AAPI youth as whiz kids is evidently absent in critiques and understandings of racial profiling or the school-to-prison pipeline in general. As a result, it is a factor often missed in discussions of solutions to the pipeline. Examining how AAPI youth are racially profiled as whiz kids reveals the need to focus on academic disengagement as a factor driving students out of schools. It also reveals how racial profiling, a convenient and pervasive tool of white supremacy, manifests itself differently to oppress another nonwhite group to the same end: the incarceration and subjugation of communities of color.

The racial profiling of AAPIs as whiz kids is also ideologically toxic. The implication that lies beneath the assumption that AAPI students are innately intelligent suggests that other minority children are not, just as the model minority myth presents AAPIs as the “good,” model minorities in contrast to Black and Latinx peoples. At schools, while AAPIs are assumed to be smart, Black children are often academically underestimated and perceived to be more belligerent and “in need of special education services.”²⁶⁹ In contrast to AAPI students, teachers expect less of Latinx students, too, with one study showing that teachers think Latinx students are up to 42 percent less likely to graduate than other groups.²⁷⁰ Evident, then, is how different minority groups are profiled at school differently, yet all concurrently subjected to racist stereotypes that hamper their educational experiences. In fact, even the seemingly positive stereotype of AAPI students is actually an insidious stereotype that limits their success and divides students of color.

2. Racial Profiling of AAPI Students as “Thugs” and “Gangsters” and

Actual Gang Membership.

While the profiling of AAPI students as whiz kids in schools predominantly impact East Asians or those perceived as such,²⁷¹ other AAPI students, especially those of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander descent and/or those with darker complexions, are also racially profiled. Critically, however, their racialization differs from that of the “whiz kid” and is more akin to the racial profiling of Black and Latinx students. Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders, though at times subsumed under the whiz kid stereotype, are often “depicted as low-achieving high school dropouts involved in gangs.”²⁷² This stereotype informs the overpolicing of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander communities, as reflected by the disproportionate arrest rates of Samoan, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian youth noted earlier.²⁷³

In communities with larger concentrations of Pacific Islander and Southeast Asian youth, young men and boys are routinely stopped and searched by police in their cars and on foot, and questioned in public places. [They] are often assumed to be gang members even if they are not. Gang databases were identified as a problem particularly for Southeast Asian boys and young men, . . . . [resulting in] serious consequences including enhanced criminal charges for minor offenses.²⁷⁴

A Vietnamese adolescent in Little Saigon in Orange County in California echoes similar experiences: “Sometimes when I drive a fixedup car, they [police] stop us for nothing. Just because we’re young and Vietnamese. We’re driving normally, like everybody else is, but they just pull us over. They be searching us, search the car, and we don’t have anything. They treated us like shit.”²⁷⁵

This type of profiling permeates into schools as well, where Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are often perceived by teachers, school officials, and others as delinquent students involved with crime.²⁷⁶ While disaggregated data on suspension and expulsion rates for Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are extremely scarce, certain localized studies indicate that they are disproportionately disciplined in schools. A 2012 study found that in Hawaii, “Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders comprised 34.7 percent of enrolled students but 51.5 percent of all suspensions; white students represented 17.5 percent of students and 12.1 percent of suspensions.”²⁷⁷ Likewise, in the school year 2013-2014, “Tongan, Micronesian and Native Hawaiian students were suspended at four times the rate of their Japanese peers and were twice as likely to be suspended as white and Filipino students.”²⁷⁸ During the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years in California, Pacific Islanders comprised a higher percentage of statewide suspensions than their total enrollment percentage.²⁷⁹

Given that even one out-of-school suspension can double a student’s risk of dropping out,²⁸⁰ it is not surprising that large numbers of Southeast Asians do not have a high school degree. In California, 42 percent Hmong, 41 percent Laotian, and 40 percent of Cambodian people lack a high school degree or GED certificate compared to only 7 percent of non-Hispanic whites, a trend that is also reflected nationally.²⁸¹ Combined with data suggesting that drop-outs are three and a half times more likely to be arrested than high school graduates, and that 68 percent of incarcerated men across the country are without a diploma,²⁸² it becomes clear that Southeast Asians, like Pacific Islanders, are being systematically driven out of schools and into the criminal system.

The perception that Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are “thugs” and gangsters also lead to lowered academic expectations, which can doom students to fail. For instance, research shows that “Hmong students have been held to low expectations by teachers and tracked into lower level courses.”²⁸³ Similarly, Sefa Aina, a Samoan community advocate states that “authority figures often track Pacific Islander students into easier classes, tap them to play sports instead of [joining] the math club.”²⁸⁴ In essence, teachers may fail to help students because they believe the students do not have a bright future ahead of them, especially if they are considered to be gangsters or simple-minded, easy-going islanders.²⁸⁵ Teacher perception of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander students as gangsters may also trigger fear and discomfort, further discouraging them from supporting students and instead encouraging them to discipline the students harshly, paving the path towards criminalization.

The profiling of these AAPI students as thugs and gangsters is no doubt grounded in white supremacist ideologies and anti-Blackness, as well as historical Yellow Peril and other xenophobic perceptions. It is not an accident that the AAPI populations most affected by this specific type of racial profiling are those with darker phenotypes, mirroring colorist and anti-Black imaginations that associate darker skin with criminality.²⁸⁶ Black and brown bodies in essence are viewed as inherently criminal, a perception that can be reinforced by other identities such as gender and sexual orientation. A visually presenting nonbinary student of color, for instance, can be perceived as especially “disruptive” and “rowdy” for not conforming to heteronormative standards of dress.²⁸⁷ Similarly, a young AAPI girl who “acts out of turn” may be perceived as especially troublesome because she is expected to be a silent “Lotus Blossom” and therefore disciplined more intensely.²⁸⁸ Or conversely, she could be perceived as a “Dragon Lady” and thus must be in need of discipline, nonetheless putting them at risk of being funneled into the pipeline.²⁸⁹

Moreover, the struggles of many Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders, often arriving to the United States with limited social, economic, and cultural capital and therefore falling into poverty,²⁹⁰ have “been associated with problems that traditionally plagued inner-city Black neighborhoods.”²⁹¹ Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are thus constructed in relation to dehumanizing, racist, and classist ideations of Blackness. At the same time, the Yellow Peril stereotype, depicting AAPIs as animalistic predatory deviants, bleeds into the perception of AAPIs as gang members and thugs. Professor Krisberg elucidates:

[AAPI] youths also suffer from a range of racist stereotypes in their encounters with [criminal] system officials. Contemporary law enforcement officials are fond of promulgating the images of the evil Chinese gangs that originate in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or China and victimize American citizens. These images are as old as those presented to the gullible public in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Hearst and McClatchy newspaper chains that showed cartoons of sinister Asian men luring attractive white women into opium dens . . . .²⁹²

Among these contemporary police tactics is the establishment of “Gang Task Forces” in the 1990s in Southern California.²⁹³ These task forces harassed and stored nonconsensual mug shots of AAPI youth on a possible gang member database.²⁹⁴ Police “justified these actions by claiming that it was very hard to differentiate and distinguish between Asians.”²⁹⁵

Akin to the absence of racial profiling of AAPIs as whiz kids in examinations of the pipeline, the racial profiling of AAPI students as gangsters is also largely ignored. This is a disheartening, missed opportunity for advocates as this type of racial profiling is already repeatedly identified as a contributing factor to the pipeline. The resultant inattention therefore not only leaves vulnerable AAPI students to persistent profiling and criminalization, but it also conceals shared struggle and shared stakes with other youths of color, hindering effective coalition-building.

a . The Harsh Reality of Gang Involvement. ²⁹⁶

Although AAPI students are unjustly profiled and assumed to be gang members, there are AAPI youth, particularly Southeast Asians, who do in fact join gangs for a variety of reasons. For several Southeast Asian immigrant youths, school can be an alienating and challenging place where they experience bullying and receive limited support to succeed academically, particularly when there are language barriers.²⁹⁷ Hieu Nguyen, a current “lifer” at San Quentin State Prison details how he felt alone at school:

For the first time I came to school in America, I still remember, I went to Milpitas High School, right. Everything’s so new. I was shocked, like, Wow, everything is so crowded, people walk everywhere. I could, I was lost. I just, I just see so many stuff, and I don’t understand, I don’t know anything! So the first day I just sit, honestly I just sit there like, “hm.” This is how school went. I feel like weird, you know what I’m saying? It’s like a new environment, I feel like, I feel like a . . . like a outcast.²⁹⁸

Hieu was also bullied; students made fun of his English and for wearing budget Payless Shoes while all the other kids wore Nike.²⁹⁹ Hieu felt alienated in this environment, feeling “low” and unwelcome at school. He eventually sought refuge in gangs, which provided him with the “recognition and a sense of self-esteem that youth desperately seek:”

When I start go hang around with other Vietnamese and join the gang, I don’t let people do that [racialized harassment and bullying] to me no more. I put my — after I got into the gang, I put myself to a higher standard now. So everywhere I go, I build my reputation. I build my respect. So if people try to come at me that way, I will put them down. If I have to use force, if I have to use violence, I will put them down, so I want them to know — acknowledge — that I am somebody. That they will no longer put me to the shame, that person again. I will no longer want to be that victim again.³⁰⁰

Hieu’s experience is not unique. Many other Vietnamese youth also join gangs because, along with harassment and academic disengagement, they experience familial and cultural struggles.³⁰¹ Many of them are “second-wave refugees whose families were disrupted by the migration experience to the United States and, as a consequence, turned to gangs as an alternative source of social and psychological support.”³⁰² In short, gangs have provided a haven from racism and bullying. In activist Sarath Suong’s words, AAPI gangs have in fact been among the “original community defenders” who walked kids to school and even raised money for funerals.³⁰³

Other Southeast Asian youth, like Cambodians and Laotians, also join gangs because of extremely limited opportunities outside of school due to poverty.³⁰⁴ The poverty and struggles these youths experience already expose them to heightened risk of engaging in criminalized activity.³⁰⁵ The risk is compounded when they are pushed out of school, which itself limits their opportunities even further and potentially traps them in a vicious cycle.³⁰⁶

AAPI gangs also expose AAPI youths to harsher criminalization and violence. This is because AAPI gangs tend to be “more involved in criminal-gain activities such as extortion, burglary, and narcotics selling”³⁰⁷ along with home invasions and kidnapping-robberies, all of which carry harsher punishments such as mandatory minimums.³⁰⁸ This specific trend is a result of how AAPI gangs prefer to target their own communities because they know that they “are the least likely to report violent crimes committed against themselves to the police” due to various reasons such as lack of culturally and linguistically competent policing, fears of deportation, and cultural stigma.³⁰⁹ This phenomenon is important to consider because underreporting potentially fuels stereotypical notions that AAPIs are not criminalized, a notion that is emphasized by the model minority myth.³¹⁰

3. Racial and Religious Profiling of AAPI/AMEMSA³¹¹ Students as

“Terrorists.”

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, another form of racial profiling targeting AAPI/AMEMSA population surged and contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline. It also continues today with the rise of Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric and policies:

[Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians] have been subjected to extensive “security” measures since the attacks, their rights undermined if not revoked by new policies, hastily passed legislation, and selective law enforcement. They have been portrayed in the mainstream media and by a number of U.S. government officials as citizen-suspects who lie outside American cultural norms, and as communities that harbor “sleeping” terrorists, posing a threat to the nation’s security.³¹²

Additionally, “[y]oung men and boys in AMEMSA communities have faced particular scrutiny, stereotyped as at risk for ‘radicalization’ and treated as perpetual threat within U.S borders. Federal and state policies following 9/11 have targeted immigrant AMEMSA young men age 16- 35 in particular.”³¹³

These imaginations of AMEMSA people, or those perceived as such, as terrorists infiltrate schools.³¹⁴ Many have marked AMEMSA students as terrorists and subjected them to unjust disciplinary practices in the name of “national security.”³¹⁵ This type of profiling becomes even more precarious when combined with racialized perceptions of the “whiz kid” discussed earlier. For instance, on September 14, 2015, fourteenyear-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested at school for bringing in a selfmade clock that his English teacher and school officials mistook for a bomb.³¹⁶

Ahmed brought the clock to school because he wanted to show it to his engineering teacher. It was inside his backpack when it beeped during his English class. His English teacher ultimately confiscated the invention, accusing Ahmed of bringing a bomb to school. Ahmed was consequently removed from class, interrogated by school administrators and police, and then “threatened with expulsion and pressured to admit he had designed a bomb.”³¹⁷ Police officers eventually arrested and handcuffed him in front of his peers. Their investigation later cleared the device and found no evidence of any ill intent on Ahmed’s part.³¹⁸ Ahmed was also suspended.³¹⁹

When news of what transpired made national headlines, many quickly and appropriately identified how Ahmed’s arrest was prejudiced and an evident example of profiling.³²⁰ Some noted racialized “doublestandards” as tied to innovation.³²¹ “Given the national emphasis on STEM, Ahmed’s teachers could have assumed that the teen was following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, who both tinkered as teenagers.” That they didn’t is proof of how “if you’re a student of color, experimenting and tinkering is seen as dangerous; for white students, it means you’re a genius.”³²² In the case of Ahmed, his invention became conflated with basically a weapon of mass destruction, and he, a terrorist.

What happened to Ahmed is not an isolated incident. Across the country, students—kids—are profiled at schools as perpetrators of terror, paralleling the anti-AMEMSA rhetoric and policies publicly instigated and inspired by the presidency of Donald Trump.³²³ In California, “20 percent of Muslim students say they have experienced discrimination by a school staff member, the very people charged with protecting them from this type of hate.”³²⁴ In Fort Bend County, Texas, “12-year-old Waleed Abushaaban” was told by his teacher that “‘we all think you’re a terrorist;’” other students eventually joined in and accused him of carrying bombs.³²⁵ Similarly, in 2015, a teacher asked a female Muslim student in Georgia if she had a bomb in her backpack; the same year, another teacher in Texas assigned homework to a class that claimed that Muslims seek to kill Americans.³²⁶ In New York, a South Asian student named Akbar reported that his teacher began ignoring him after she discovered that he had skipped class to attend Mosque.³²⁷

This form of profiling has acute practical implications. For one, the profiling of students as terrorists magnifies their subjection to discriminatory disciplinary practices that can propel them to the pipeline. Such profiling also fosters hostile educational environments that can impel students to not only feel demeaned and suffer mental health issues but also be academically disengaged—e.g., truancy and failure. These in themselves increase the chances of AMEMSA youth to get entangled with the criminal system, as well as encourage other students to bully or harass them.³²⁸

Overlooking AMEMSA-specific profiling also occludes the connections between the criminalization of AMEMSA people in the United States with the country’s imperialist global history and agenda:

[T]he U.S. government has targeted these groups both before and after 9/11 because of its particular political interests in the regions from which these communities originate. The criminalization of these groups is linked to the rise of the U.S. as a global power and to silencing dissent of its foreign policy objectives. Since 9/11, they have provided an internal and external scapegoat for the nation’s foreign policy failures, the perceived sense of vulnerability of its inhabitants, and its inability to protect its citizens. Excluding [AMEMSA communities] from cultural citizenship and criminalizing their communities is the ideological and practical work that builds popular support for sacrificing their civil rights for the presumed sense of safety of the majority, links them to “enemy” nations and combatants, and delegitimizes their dissent. Isolated as potentially disloyal, in part using notions of essential cultural difference that are diffused through the mainstream media and in popular culture representations, the profiling and criminalization of these groups by the state is tolerated by the public. Arabs, Muslims, South Asian Americans become accepted as cultural outsiders, so that what happens to them is (falsely) seen as not affecting anyone else. In the process, the state whittles away one democratic right after another, so that prolonged and secret detentions, detention without charge, and even torture of detainees become acceptable state practices in the name of “national security.”³²⁹

This exclusion of AMEMSA communities from “cultural citizenship” and their casting as inherently “other” are reminiscent of the same Orientalist mechanisms that has historically and contemporarily dehumanized larger AAPI communities. Both the model minority and Yellow Peril stereotypes have cast these communities as “perpetual others,” entirely culturally alien people, who endanger the white social and political status quo of the United States.³³⁰ In essence, AAPIs, including AMEMSA people are “Orientals” and portrayed as “them:” exotic, barbaric, totalitarian, and corrupt, as opposed to the people of the “Occident,” who are “us,”³³¹ modern, democratic, rational, and pure.³³²

Contemporary manifestations of Orientalist criminalization outside school include “mass arrests, secret and indefinite detentions, prolonged detention of ‘material witnesses,’ closed hearings, secret evidence, eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, FBI home and work visits, wiretapping, property seizures, selective removals of aliens with technical visa violations, and mandatory Special Registration.”³³³ Over 100,000 AMEMSA community members have been personally affected by any one of these measures, and “at least 1,200 immigrant men were held in detention centers across the United States immediately following 9/11.”³³⁴ Donald Trump’s various executive orders in early 2017 banning travel from “Muslim nations” are more recent examples.³³⁵ So, too, are the “Yellow Peril”-informed arrests of various Asian American professors and researchers like Xiaoxing Xi, Sherry Chen, and Guoqing Caoare for espionage.³³⁶

In summary, the omission of this type of racial profiling in critiques of the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration leaves U.S. imperialism as a criminalizing force unchallenged. Shared histories of systemic oppression, which can carve spaces for meaningful coalition building, also become hidden, as do the lessons such histories impart.³³⁷ Accordingly, integrating the racial profiling of AMEMSA, as with the inclusion of other AAPI youth experiences, sheds further light on processes of criminalization. It highlights that these processes are imperial and global and that they come in varying, even conflicting, degrees and forms (e.g., AAPIs can be simultaneously profiled as whiz kids, gangsters, and terrorists) all in service of white supremacy abroad and domestically. Importantly, their experiences should therefore instigate and inform a search for solutions to tackle the problem of their criminalization head-on.

E . Racialized Bullying and Harassment of AAPI Youth ³³⁸

In addition to various forms of racial profiling, bullying and harassment of AAPI youths at schools also contribute to their criminalization. However, their experiences of racialized bullying are conspicuously absent from critiques of the school-to-prison pipeline. Indeed, while racial profiling, at least of Black and Latinx youth,³³⁹ is incorporated in discussions, bullying, much less anti-AAPI bullying, is excluded from examination. This omission disregards the whole context of school as a sites of disparate power dynamics. For AAPI youth in particular, this omission poses dire consequences as racialized bullying creates or exacerbates risk factors that can lead to criminalization.³⁴⁰

Critically, while necessarily interpersonal in nature, bullying mirrors systemic disparities and dynamics of power.³⁴¹ It “both builds on existing embodied, classed, raced, gendered and sexualized social inequalities and simultaneously prepares young people to accept such inequalities as a ‘normal’ part of living in the world.”³⁴² For example, students may feel empowered to racially harass others given their teachers’ own display of racial animus,³⁴³ dehumanizing media representations,³⁴⁴ rampant societal violence,³⁴⁵ or racist political discourse.³⁴⁶ In other words, bullying is informed by, and should not be divorced from, larger social, political, and cultural contexts.³⁴⁷

Racialized bullying of AAPI youths at schools is a profound issue. According to a task force assembled by the federal government, “[o]f all students who reported being bullied at school during the 2012-2013 school year, Asians reported the highest rate of bullying occurring in a classroom, hallway, or stairwell compared to all other racial groups.”³⁴⁸ Likewise, nationally, 54 percent of bullying that AAPI students experienced transpired inside the classroom.³⁴⁹ In localities with concentrations of AAPI youth, bullying is especially prevalent. For example, a 2012 survey indicated that half of AAPI participants from New York City public schools experienced “bias-based harassment.”³⁵⁰ In California, AAPI LGBTQ youths “reported the highest instances of racial harassment amongst LGBTQ students of color,” with transgender and gender nonconforming AAPI youth being easy targets for ridicule and discriminatory discipline.³⁵¹ In the COVID-19 era, a recent national study showed that one out of four AAPI youths experienced racist bullying.³⁵²

Racialized bullying of AAPI students take various forms, including verbally, such as insults, taunts, racial slurs, and cyberbullying; physically, such as assault, vandalism, and theft; or socially, such as gossiping, spreading rumors, or public shaming.³⁵³ These forms of bullying typically exacerbate academic disengagement, truancy, behavioral problems, and mental health issues—all of which can lead to disciplinary practices and criminalization under zero tolerance regimes.³⁵⁴

Similar to the distinct types of racial profiling targeting AAPI youth, these forms of bullying are grounded in dehumanizing stereotypes. AAPI students are bullied for their immigration status, limited English proficiency, perceived religion, and appearance.³⁵⁵ AAPI students are often told to “go back to their own country,” mocked for their “ethnic” lunches, and harassed for the way they look—e.g., their facial features, the shape of their eyes, or their skin color.³⁵⁶ During the COVID-19 pandemic, students have been bullied and scapegoated as virus-carriers.³⁵⁷ South Asians, particularly those of the Sikh faith, are also called terrorists by other students, similar to how school officials profile AMEMSA youth.³⁵⁸ For instance, a California survey examining Sikh children found that over 65 percent of Sikh boys in middle school with or without turbans faced harassment, with the percentage jumping to 74 percent for those with turbans.³⁵⁹ Similarly, Muslim youth have been targets of racialized harassment at schools. Localized surveys such as one from California found that 55 percent of Muslim students experienced bullying or discrimination in the form of nonconsensual touching or hijab-grabbing.³⁶⁰

Personal anecdotes also echo the stark reality of bullying. One Muslim student reflects accordingly:

People who are new to the environment are bullied a lot. I got bullied in second grade because I was new to the country and couldn’t speak English. I also got bullied in sixth grade because I’m Muslim and that it was so severe that I had to move schools. However, it didn’t help because I was still bullied throughout middle school because I was Muslim.³⁶¹

In another instance, “17-year-old California high school student Bayan Zehlif, a hijab-wearing Muslim, was identified in her yearbook not by her name but as ‘Isis Phillips,’”³⁶² associating her with the terrorist organization Daesh, commonly referred to as “ISIS.”³⁶³ Bayan felt “extremely saddened, disgusted, hurt, and embarrassed”³⁶⁴ especially in light of past discrimination by teachers who stated in class that “‘the people who caused 9/11 shouldn’t be here today.’”³⁶⁵ Emotionally and psychologically scarred, Bayan did not return to school until the issue was addressed.³⁶⁶

Bayan’s refusal to return to school is typical for many bullied AAPI and AMEMSA students. Finding school alienating and hostile, these students are scared to attend class, especially on the anniversaries or aftermath of terrorist attacks.³⁶⁷ This reluctance to attend class reflects the trend that bullied students are five to six times more likely to miss school, exacerbating risks of academic disengagement and truancy.³⁶⁸ And under zero tolerance policies, these consequences often lead to suspensions and expulsions which funnel students into the school-to-prison pipeline.

This was the reality for Kamsan Suon, a Cambodian refugee and a “lifer” at San Quentin State Prison.³⁶⁹ In Cambodia, Kamsan struggled under the Khmer Rogue’s violent rule. He constantly crossed fields with landmines to collect leftovers from soldiers to feed himself. He escaped to America, hopeful. Yet he soon found a new set of issues in the United States. Like Hieu Nguyen, Kamsan faced harassment at school for having poor English and for being “different.” He recalls:

In the fourth grade, I remember we was walking, I mean, we were waiting in line to go back into the class, right, ‘cause it was recess, all of a sudden — I’m just minding my own business — all of a sudden, the kid he comes up and he says, “Hey, Kamsan,” and he said, “Look at this,” and you know, he held a soda can in his hand, and he threw it on the ground and he said, “The sound of the can as it roll and bounce” — he said, “that’s how your name sounds like,” You know, I got really upset about that, and whole bunch of other kids laughed. . . . I remember um, walking home from school, you know, I still wasn’t able to communicate. And this white kid, he keep on harassing me, you know, I don’t know how to communicate, so I just spoke to him in my language, in Cambodian . . . I says, “Stop pushing me!” You know . . . And he laughs at me because I spoke in my language. He laughs at me and he mimics my language, you know, saying ‘Ching chong chang’ . . . stuff like that, you know what I mean . . . .³⁷⁰

Kamsan was one of numerous AAPI kids who are bullied because of their limited English and perceived perpetual foreignness. Left feeling isolated and jaded by harassment, many of these youths—like Kamsan, as well as Eddy and Hieu—then engage in criminalized activities such as joining gangs and bringing weapons to school.³⁷¹ In Orange County, California, for example, several Vietnamese youths, often targets of violence and scorn “because of their smaller physical stature and obvious racial characteristics,” carried weapons to school for protection.³⁷² These actions not only make schools more unsafe, but they also directly expose youths to the pipeline. Apart from joining gangs and bringing weapons to school, other AAPI students resort to fighting and violence to cope with bullying, likewise paving the path toward prison. This was the case with Masa, a multiracial Asian student from Hawaii. In his own words:

Yeah, I used to get teased a lot that’s why I became violent. In sixth grade I just got fed up with it, with other people. So, I just turned around and one day I just punched a kid back, and it felt good. And he never bothered me again. So, I was like, “It works.” It got to a point when I was fighting all the time. Like I don’t take anything, like I was crazy and stuff. I was just doing whatever I wanted. . . .³⁷³

Masa was eventually removed from school, arrested, incarcerated for assault, and sent to a juvenile prison.³⁷⁴ Plainly manifested, then, is the school-to-prison pipeline.

F. Issues of Mental Health

Among the host of pernicious effects of racialized bullying and harassment is the harm done to the mental health of AAPI students. As a result of the indignities and isolation caused by bullying, many AAPI youths experience depression and suicidal ideation.³⁷⁵ Suicide is indeed a leading cause of death for AAPIs.³⁷⁶ For Asian Americans aged fifteen to twenty-four, suicide was the second most common cause of death nationally.³⁷⁷ Limited data also suggest that “among high school youth, a higher percentage of Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander youth report seriously considering attempting suicide or making a suicide plan in the past year than in the overall U.S. population.”³⁷⁸

Rates are even direr when it comes to AAPIs of certain identities, reflecting intersectional forms of oppression. Among young women of all ethnicities, Asian Americans have the second highest suicide rate.³⁷⁹ Additionally, “the rate of completed suicide among the 15-to-25 age group of Asian American women is rising rapidly, increasing by 96.3 percent from 2000 to 2009.”³⁸⁰ Meanwhile, 15 percent of AAPI LGBTQ youth reported a past-year suicide attempt, with 28 percent of transgender or nonbinary AAPI youth reporting a past-year suicide attempt.³⁸¹

Moreover, struggles with mental health can be especially challenging for certain Southeast Asians such as Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian youth—many of whom inherit trauma and carry the legacy of war:

AAPI refugees are more likely than other immigrants to have had traumatic experiences and subsequent mental health problems. Numerous researchers have demonstrated a strong response connection between exposure to violence and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in AAPI youth, particularly in Southeast and Central Asian refugee communities. Migrants coming from experiences of war and massive social upheaval are at particular risk for PTSD. While many of the younger generation have not directly experienced the same trauma as their parents and extended family members, the PTSD in the family may affect the home environment and create tensions.³⁸²

Students carry these experiences into school, as was the case for Ryan Hem, a refugee haunted by the horrific violence he witnessed in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over:

Even though I was little, I remembered most of what was going on. I saw the Khmer Rouge torture and kill people. There was one frightening torture I witnessed which I can never forget. As I was walking back to our campground, I came across young man that was hung upside-down from a tree branch. His hands were tied behind his back and he was screaming for his life. Four young Khmer Rouge soldiers stood around him laughing, as one soldier slit the man’s throat with a machete.³⁸³

Bullying worsened the mental health issues Ryan experienced due to such trauma. On the way to school, bullies frequently mocked and beat him up.³⁸⁴ They also stole his bike and threw away his books.³⁸⁵ Ryan consequently struggled and became disinterested in school. He dropped out and got entangled in criminal activity that ultimately landed him in prison. He was later deported to Cambodia, the very place he fled from.³⁸⁶

Cultural, financial, and linguistic barriers³⁸⁷ to support services compound the struggles of AAPI youth with mental health. Just as the model minority myth masks the struggles of larger AAPI communities, so too does it render them invisible at schools. As a result, AAPI students suffer in silence; both students and their guardians may not be aware of available resources at school or beyond. By the same token, schools may not have accessible or culturally relevant resources to begin with.³⁸⁸ Furthermore, AAPI students typically hesitate to notify their parents of their suffering at schools due to possible generational gaps and because many of them worry about burdening their parents whom they perceive as already having sacrificed immensely for them.³⁸⁹

Critiques of the school-to-prison pipeline fail to include bullying as a risk factor driving students into the criminal legal system. Similar to the inclusion of the specificities of AAPIs’ racial profiling, the incorporation of AAPI youths’ experiences with bullying sheds further light on the complex operations of the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition, examining the racialized bullying of AAPIs exposes a crucial force that both causes and intensifies academic disengagement, behavioral problems, and mental health issues—all of which are risk factors in pushing students out of school.

V. Abolitionist Praxis

A. Lessons Learned

The exclusion of AAPI youths in critical examinations of the school-to-prison pipeline leaves the larger issue of AAPI criminalization unnamed and unaddressed. This poses alarming consequences for the demographic. On one hand, their exclusion signifies that most advocates and reformers fail to recognize that the problem even exists. Advocates and reformers neglect the reality that an entire other racial group is being funneled into the prison industrial complex.³⁹⁰ The solutions they offer, while necessary in many respects, therefore do little to alleviate the distinct forms of AAPI criminalization. With regard to the school-to-prison pipeline, the neglect of AAPI youths renders the unique forms of racial profiling and bullying that target them unchecked. Put crudely, AAPI kids will still end up in our nation’s cages even if reformers succeed in implementing their proffered solutions to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Consider frequently suggested solutions, which encompass the demilitarization and elimination of police presence at schools, perhaps accomplished through impact litigation.³⁹¹ While such efforts are incontrovertibly critical to restrain the rampant criminalization of students, particularly Black and Latinx, they provide little redress for the academic disengagement and bullying that drive AAPI youths into the criminal system. Indeed, elimination of police at schools does not thwart the racist, consequential expectations of AAPI students as whiz kids, gang members, and terrorists. It also does little to deter the racialized harassment of AAPI youths by both students and officials at schools. In short, mainstream advocates’ proposals for reform provide little protection for AAPI youths.

Nor is the result more promising when it comes to more attentive critics of the prison industrial complex. Multiracial criminologists, Asian American Jurisprudence scholars, and other critical scholars neglect the impact of the prison industrial complex on AAPIs. Although they generally expose and contest the white supremacist foundations of the carceral state, some disregard the role of the model minority myth—a myth that paints AAPIs in close proximity to whiteness while upholding anti-Black ideations of criminality. The absence of criminalized AAPIs in their advocacy consequently renders the model minority myth free to perpetrate harm and obfuscate the expansive scope of the prison industrial complex. More specifically, the lacuna within critical circles conceals the divide- and-conquer tactics of white supremacy; maintains noxious ideologies of anti-Blackness, colorblindness, and post-racialism; discounts the role of external structures like imperialism and xenophobia in the prison industrial complex; and erases the existence of criminalized AAPIs. It is in this sense that the exclusion of AAPIs in analyses amplifies the “disappearing” power of prisons—how prisons “do not disappear social problems” but rather “disappear human beings.”³⁹² Without their voices in analyses, prisons disappear both AAPI prisoners and the very ideologies and mechanisms that pushed them into prisons in the first place.

Conversely, the inclusion of AAPI experiences with criminalization, like the integration of the stories of AAPI youths with the pipeline, yields significant fruit. First, it generates space for powerful, meaningful coalition-building. Not only does the inclusion of AAPIs in analyses reveal shared legacies of systemic criminalization and oppression between communities of color, but it also unveils shared stakes among them. Cognizance of these shared stakes—that each group’s experiences interlocks with another’s—serves as a powerful catalyst for fiercer coalitions.³⁹³ For example, recognition that the model minority myth harms AAPI communities and concurrently reinforces anti-Blackness can foster empathy and strengthen solidarity between the two communities by moving beyond sole recognition of a common enemy (e.g., white supremacy) or Winter 2021] AAPIs & Prison Industrial Complex 513

common problem (e.g., the school-to-prison pipeline).³⁹⁴ Otherwise stated, AAPIs and Black communities can, and should, unite against systemic injustice not only because they both experience racism but also because, for instance, each group’s stereotypes, like the Asian whiz kid and lazy Black kid, are mutually reinforcing.³⁹⁵

The inclusion of AAPI experiences in studies of criminalization also heeds and honors the voices of Eddy and other criminalized AAPIs—the very grassroots philosophers who acutely feel the “falsity”³⁹⁶ and violence of the criminal “justice” system and thus better understand the nature of oppression and “necessity of liberation.”³⁹⁷ Their insights unravel the inherent contradictions of oppression, specifically the fragility and fictitiousness of racialized stereotypes. The experiences of criminalized poor migrant AAPIs like Eddy—as one example—directly contravene the suppositions of the model minority myth. So do the experiences of AAPI youths who may, in various contexts, all be stereotyped as a whiz kid, terrorist, or gang member. These contradictions reveal the fragility of white supremacist logics, including those of supposed superiority and inferiority.³⁹⁸ Further, they highlight how stereotypes and oppression in general are not destiny but are impermanent, socially constructed, shifting—and therefore can be disrupted.³⁹⁹ Recognizing that “oppression is full of such contradictions” opens up new points of attack to ultimately disrupt and dismantle it.⁴⁰⁰

Moreover, the inclusion of criminalized AAPIs’ perspectives deepens existing critical conceptions of crime and the prison industrial complex. They contest the common-sense understanding that criminality is solely a product of “committing a crime.” They reveal that criminalization is a process formed by a constellation of individual, interpersonal, institutional, and ideological forces. That AAPI youths are pushed into the school-to-prison pipeline by various forces—academic, disciplinary, social, legal—epitomizes this reality. This reaffirms that criminalization is not simply about the criminal system but also various other institutions and practices, including schools and discipline, that are colored by an imperialist, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, classist, and ableist structure.⁴⁰¹

These lessons are crucial ones. In addition to exposing the confines of common solutions to the pipeline, which largely focus on the legal and disciplinary systems alone, the inclusion of AAPIs in analyses casts light on neglected dimensions of the prison industrial complex. This, in turn, should expand our understanding and imagination of solutions. For example, even the imperative eradication of zero tolerance policies—often the direct mechanism that pushes students into prison—does little to prevent the presumptions of AAPI criminality (e.g., gang and terrorist stereotypes) or exceptionality (e.g., whiz kid trope) that help drive AAPI youths into the criminal system. Nor does the proscription of zero tolerance policies alleviate the mental health issues stemming from bullying or inherited trauma caused by imperialist wars. In short, the integration of criminalized AAPI experiences provides and necessitates a more comprehensive approach to addressing the criminal system. It compels solutions that do not solely home in on the dimensions of the criminal system, but on other institutions, practices, and actors.⁴⁰² The question thus becomes: What is to be done?

B. Searching for Solutions

In addition to the need for advocates and scholars to listen and heed the voices of the overlooked, several answers lie in the abolitionist vision. Guided by the lodestar of a world without the need for prisons,⁴⁰³ abolitionists call for a comprehensive “transformation of our political, social, and economic lives,” which would achieve justice through a “holistic engagement with the structural conditions that give rise to suffering, as well as the interpersonal dynamics involved in violence.”⁴⁰⁴

Justice in abolitionist terms involves at once exposing the violence, hypocrisy, and dissembling entrenched in existing legal practices, while attempting to achieve peace, make amends, and distribute resources more equitably. Justice for abolitionists is an integrated endeavor to prevent harm, intervene in harm, obtain reparations, and transform the conditions in which we live. This conception of justice works, for example, to eliminate the criminalization of poverty and survival while addressing the criminality of a global social order in which the eight wealthiest men own the same amount of wealth as fifty percent of all people on earth. To approach justice in these terms requires . . . collective resistance and revolution at the scene of “crime” itself.⁴⁰⁵

Abolitionists develop nonpunitive measures to hold people accountable, address harm, and cultivate new conditions that prevent harm in the first place.⁴⁰⁶ They advocate for the “creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete.”⁴⁰⁷ Prevalent approaches include decriminalization, mutual aid systems, and transformative justice alternative practices like “circles.”⁴⁰⁸ In proposing solutions, abolitionists resolve to only further “nonreformist reforms,” reforms that, at bottom, push for true emancipation and freedom and a world without a need for prisons.⁴⁰⁹ “By engaging in nonreformist reforms, abolitionists strive to make transformative changes in carceral systems with the objective of demolishing those systems rather than fixing them. They recognize that these reforms alone are inadequate; indeed, achieving these piecemeal changes in the prison industrial complex reveals the necessity of its total eradication.”⁴¹⁰ Quintessentially, “reforming prisons is diametrically opposed to abolishing them.”⁴¹¹

These abolitionist principles provide a powerful framework to combat the school-to-prison pipeline, specifically as it subordinates AAPI youth. First, they call for addressing the root conditions that criminalize AAPI youth, such as academic disengagement, truancy, and mental health issues caused by racism and other forms of oppression. They expose and address the limitations of commonly proposed remedies like zero tolerance approaches to bullying, demilitarization, and reforms of disciplinary practices, which all provide limited redress to AAPI-specific criminalization.⁴¹² Applying abolitionist principles to the criminalization of AAPI youth thus calls for practices that improve the physical, social, emotional, and educational conditions at schools and beyond—changes that do not merely focus on dimensions of discipline and policing. At school, these can range from the implementation of restorative and transformative justice approaches to “discipline” as well as transformative justice-trained educators and staff.⁴¹³

A novel, perhaps abolitionist antidote to the criminalization of AAPI youth may be the implementation of critical curricula such as Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies is a set of “units of study, courses, or programs that are centered on the knowledge and perspectives of an ethnic or racial group, reflecting narratives and points of view rooted in that group’s lived experiences and intellectual scholarship.”⁴¹⁴ Ethnic Studies addresses the failures of mainstream curricula which alienate, erase, and even falsify marginalized groups’ experiences and histories.⁴¹⁵ Hallmarks of Ethnic Studies include the centering of counter-narratives from the perspectives of people of color, criticality, reclamation of cultural identities, intersectionality and multiplicity, community engagement, culturally responsive and mediated pedagogy, and the view that students are intellectuals themselves.⁴¹⁶ Above all, Ethnic Studies is a critical, unfinished decolonizing political project that seeks to “rehumanize experiences, challenge problematic Euro-centric narratives, and build community solidarity across difference.”⁴¹⁷

Ethnic Studies—unlike typical solutions to the pipeline that narrowly focus on dimensions of discipline—therefore seeks to cultivate critical consciousness among the student body and reach the unchecked factors of academic disengagement, truancy, and mental health issues caused by anti-AAPI racism at schools. It aims to trigger critical consciousness in students, to decolonize their minds by offering students “narratives, analytical frameworks, and epistemologies that speak to the central concerns of their lives.”⁴¹⁸ This process enables all students, including others of color and white students, to learn more about themselves and each other.⁴¹⁹ It also fosters empathy and a better campus climate, deterring risk factors like racialized bullying and harassment in schools. For AAPI students in particular, Ethnic Studies can inspire them to unlearn the model minority myth, especially beneficial for those who internalize anti- Blackness and blame themselves for their own struggles at school. Longterm, Ethnic Studies has also been shown to make more culturally conscious, democratically-minded citizens.⁴²⁰

Ethnic Studies also leads to improvements in attendance, academic performance, graduation rates, self-esteem levels, and critical thinking of students.⁴²¹ A recent study by Stanford University, for example, found that in San Francisco high schools, Ethnic Studies improved attendance “by 21 percentage points, GPA by 1.4 grade points and credits earned by 23.”⁴²² In other words, Ethnic Studies directly tackles the risk factors of academic disengagement and truancy caused by the model minority myth and other anti-AAPI forces that criminalize AAPI youth.

By no means is Ethnic Studies a pristine panacea to the criminalization of AAPI youth or even the school-to-prison pipeline itself. It does not stop, among others, the flood of suspensions and expulsions, the violence of police, and the discriminatory forms of discipline at schools. Nor does it fund or desegregate schools or address external mechanisms like poverty and inhumane immigration policies that inform the criminalization of so many students. Nor can its proposal be a panacea—in Rachel Herzing’s words, as quoted in the opening, “study is not enough.” And additionally, as abolitionists repeatedly stress, justice requires profound reimagination and restructuring of every segment of society. But the implementation of Ethnic Studies does not, and should not, preclude other “non-reformist reforms.” Ethnic Studies is merely offered here as both a supplement and complement to non-reformist reforms because Ethnic Studies does take us one step toward the abolitionist vision. It specifically addresses the factors that criminalize AAPIs, factors that are left untouched by commonly proposed reforms for schooling and discipline. Its implementation calls for a radical reimagination of schooling, education, and epistemology itself—of knowledge, of thinking, of teaching, of acting. It dignifies and humanizes history and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Indeed, these are precisely the reasons why Eddy Zheng and his fellow prisoners fought for Ethnic Studies while in prison.⁴²³

By no means is this Article also meant to be a panacea for the erasure of AAPI criminalization. Due to the dearth of material on the subject, the Article falls far short of providing a comprehensive picture of AAPI criminalization.⁴²⁴ Neither has this been the goal. Indeed, the Article only aims to begin highlighting and addressing the conspicuous absence of AAPI criminalization in academia, media, and advocacy. It argues that the model minority myth concurrently tokenizes and erases AAPIs while informing and perpetuating their criminalization. The examination of AAPI youth experiences with the school-to-prison pipeline particularly illustrates how AAPIs, similar to other minority groups, are harmed by the prison industrial complex. In so doing, the Article disrupts the notion that AAPIs are “model minorities” and argues that the exclusion of AAPIs in formal and informal discussions of crime has several dire practical and theoretical implications. These dangerous consequences include failing to address the unique factors expelling AAPI students out of schools and into prison, therefore maintaining systems of mass incarceration; investing in toxic, structurally violent ideologies such as anti- Blackness; neglecting long, shared histories and legacies of oppression; and hindering possibilities for collective and creative strategies for meaningful social change. By supplementing as well as identifying limitations of powerful, salient evaluations of the criminal system, the Article uncovers a more complete and nuanced understanding of the nature of various structural inequalities.

And if nothing else, the Article invites further investigation of the topic at hand, calling us to listen to overlooked populations and focus on unexamined dimensions of oppression to inspire new approaches to liberation. The vision of a world without prisons requires fundamental change not only in our criminal system but in all our interactions, institutions, and ideas. Only when we embody the truth that profound problems require profound, multidimensional, and collective solutions can we transform into a humane, just society with no prisons. Only then can we achieve the “true focus of revolutionary change,” which is “never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.”⁴²⁵