What is Juvenile Incarceration

School violence inside youth prisons proves challenging to explore. The diversity among incarcerated students, variation in the layout and management of youth prison schools, and the trauma caused by confinement factor into how school violence unfolds. This chapter makes four contributions to landscaping the study of school violence inside youth prison schools. First, contrary to popular stereotypes, students have offenses across a spectrum of non-violent to violent crimes. Second, classrooms in some youth prisons are the only social spaces and violence gets funneled into them. Third, school violence intervention programs used in youth prison schools must contend with the trauma-inducing aspects involved in living in a correctional setting. Fourth, public discourse misplaces attention on punitive responses outside of a complex understanding of the students, experiences inside youth prison schools, and possibilities beyond schooling behind bars. These contributions scaffold future directions in research on school violence in youth prison schools.