Book Review Essay
Abstract
URBAN EDUCATION / SEPTEMBER 1999BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Book Review Essay Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools, by John Devine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 279 pp. This insightful and thought-provoking book challenges com- monly held assumptions about the nature and process of violence in inner-city schools. The central thesis is that urban school violence in a postmodern society is produced by the absence of the gaze, that is, teachers' tendency to ignore student transgressions and avoid conflict. Moreover, the author argues, the traditional student- teacher nexus has withered away with a "technosecurity apparatus" carrying out the principal function of disciplining students. Teach- ers have been assigned a sovereign cognitive role while delegating to low-skilled security forces the responsibility for supervising the "body," controlling student behavior, and managing school disci- pline (p. 2). Maximum Security offers a fresh and bold approach to the issue of school violence. This work provides a depth of under- standing of school violence that in my view overcomes the limita- tions of linguistic, psychosocial, social reproduction, and structural explanations. Devine's opening chapter sets the stage for his penetrating syn- thesis of school violence by introducing two competing discourses in school