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A substantial body of literature documenting the "school-to-prison-pipeline" identifies the adverse effects of punitive school discipline policies and how they have increased the contact students have with the juvenile justice system. This literature tends to position school policies and the broader education system as a significant contributor – both directly and indirectly – to incarceration. Relying on data from California, our paper first argues that there is little evidence of a direct "school-to-prison pipeline," as school discipline policies are rarely directly responsible for juvenile incarceration. Drawing from an extensive secondary literature on mass incarceration and data on incarceration and crime rates, the paper then argues that there is little reason to believe that school policy is a substantive indirect driver of incarceration rates. Finally, we show that activists and policymakers have adopted the STPP framework in ways that incorrectly suggest that changes in school policy are key to addressing incarceration. While the metaphor has proven to be morally evocative and catchy, attracting the attention of activists and politicians across the political spectrum, it ultimately obfuscates the complex realities of what drives punitiveness in schools and in society writ large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theatre and its appurtenances can project events, problems and issues of society. Its hegemony consists in performances and varied possibilities of expression with great propensity to awaken social consciousness stimulate emotions, and provide certain 'experiences' to invent a 'new' future. This paper takes a look at one of such experiences through a critical appraisal of the stage performance of Ahmed Yerima's Trials of Oba Ovonramwen as presented at the Chinua Achebe Arts Theatre, University of Calabar. Invoking Elizabeth Wessling’s Writing History as a Prophet, this paper argues that the political perspective of the narrator or writer conditions the many versions of history. The politics and poetics of performance as established by Augusto Boal in many of his works suggest that history need not be written by the oppressor alone but can be subject to the re-writing and re-interpretation of the “vanquished”. In the case of Ahmed Yerima’s Trials of Oba Ovonramwen, the interpretation of history is both a creative and critical process in which the act of narration itself becomes a “symbolic” one through which past misrepresentations can be subject to critiques and re-readings. In addition to revisiting the version of this episode of “British Punitive Expedition” to the Benin Kingdom in 1897, this paper submits that through performance the oppressed can not only recuperate his/her history but also re-inscribe the correct(ed) version into the annals of global politics and archival repository.