| Sumario: | The critiques levied at exclusionary school discipline practices like suspensions and expulsions, are at their core, about time and space – based in concerns over how youth are spending their time, and where they are spending it. Many states have found a seemingly progressive solution to this time-and-space problem in the disciplinary alternative school, where temporal and spatial logics continue to flourish. Drawing on a critical qualitative content analysis of publicly available materials from thirty disciplinary alternative schools across the US, I argue that time and enclosure work as active forces to dispossess students of the ability to move through time and space freely. Ideally, this is to ensure that the predominantly marginalized youth that fill the disciplinary alternative school continues to occupy an intentionally marginalized space within the racial capitalist order. As such, the disciplinary alternative school must be understood not as an 'alternative' to exclusion and carcerality, but rather as a 'reformist reform,' designed to covertly bolster the hegemonic order. However, despite the persistent adaptability of the racial capitalist state that this analysis reveals, I conclude with a brief discussion of abolition as a way to truly move beyond the reformist reforms of racial capitalism and construct a new, liberatory world order.
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