The Center’s Doctoral and Faculty Fellowships provide funding to allow recipients to make significant progress on research projects. This year, we profile two 2020-21 fellows from the Department of History — a doctoral candidate and mentor — whose archival work reveals the connections between policing, education, mass incarceration, and mass deportation in 20th and 21st century America.
David Meltsner (History), Tedder Family Doctoral Fellow
The United Federation of Teachers and the Making of the School-To-Prison Pipeline
David Meltsner is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Florida who is writing a dissertation on the school-to-prison pipeline.
In the 1970s, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) advocated for policies that established a foundation for the school-to-prison pipeline, a development that disproportionately pushes Black and Latino students out of school and into a punitive criminal justice system. By highlighting and politicizing disorder in the city’s public schools, the UFT convinced lawmakers, city Board of Education officials, media, and the public to support policies and protocols that increasingly criminalized students. These measures entailed the heightened surveillance of students by security personnel and new technologies, such as closed-circuit television, walkie talkies and alarm systems; the suspension and expulsion of “disruptive” or “violent” students; and the utilization of police services to address delinquency and truancy.
Lauren Pearlman (History), Rothman Faculty Summer Fellow
The Security State: The Rise of Private Security Industries in Post-World War II America
Lauren Pearlman is an Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Florida. She is working on her second book project examining the rise of private security industries in post-World War II America.
Over the course of the 20th century, private military and security companies like Blackwater (now Academi), Dyncorp and G4S have helped to create a multibillion-dollar global security industry. The roots of G4S in the Wackenhut Corporation, a private detective firm founded in 1954 in Coral Gables, Florida, is one example of how companies created to supply local security guards expanded rapidly through state and military contracts to fight organized crime and surveil public spaces and transit systems. Today, these same companies are increasingly seen in conflict zones and lobbying for private prison and immigration detention center contracts. Consequently, they play major roles in extending state power and empire building through paramilitary activities throughout the Americas and beyond.