Black students account for 15.1% of public school students, yet represent 38.2% of out-of-school suspensions, 28.7% of referrals to law enforcement, and 31.6% of school arrests (U.S. Department of Education, 2021). Suspended and expelled youth are less likely to complete high school or attend college (Rosenbaum, 2020), and more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults (Bacher-Hicks et al., 2019). Researchers have considered numerous factors as possible explanations for racial disparities in discipline (Welsh and Little, 2018). Studies tend to focus on the behaviors and characteristics of students (Skiba et al., 2002; Wallace et al., 2008; Huang and Cornell, 2017), decision-making among school teachers and administrators, including discipline referrals and sanctions (Owens and McLanahan, 2020; Skiba et al., 2014), and sorting into punitive schooling environments (Owens and McLanahan, 2020; Gopalan and Nelson, 2019). Few studies have focused on the ways that school environments shape student outcomes through everyday routines and practices. We argue that school environments are structurally influenced by carceral ideology: a propensity to solve problems using the tools of the carceral state, including surveillance, coercion, confinement, and correction. Carceral ideology is a belief system that views societal problems as the result of individual and familial failures that require correction. Carceral ideology shapes not only school discipline, but also the distribution of knowledge, curricula, and materials. An accumulation of carceral practices in schools may alter the education, beliefs, and identities of poor and racially minoritized students in harmful ways, inhibiting their successful transition to college, the workplace, and other social environments (Golann, 2015). This study investigates not only the prevalence of carceral ideology in schools, but also explores the links between carceral ideology and the local, political context. We consider two structural drivers of punitive school environments: racialized social constructions and political ideology. First, the social construction of a target population is an important driver of policy design. According to Schneider & Ingram (1993), "deviants" who both lack power and are subject to negative stereotypes tend to be assigned burdens by policymakers. Deviant social constructions are particularly dangerous for Black people, as they can, "jeopardize the formal standing of already marginal individuals in relation to the state" (Cohen, 2004). Race is a salient aspect of social constructions, as punitive disciplinary measures are more prevalent in school districts with greater levels of segregation and racial bias (Roch and Edwards, 2017; Riddle and Sinclair, 2019). Additionally, a dependent social construction provides policy-makers and other political players with a rationale for paternalistic social control. As low-income Black people can be constructed as both dependent and deviant, institutions lean on prison-like methods of social control to constrain the flow of resources to race-class subjugated communities (Wacquant, 2009). Second, we argue that conservative political ideology mirrors carceral ideology in its goals for education. Neoconservatism in education policy decision-making promotes social control and emphasizes individual responsibility over systemic issues (Apple, 2004). Conservative belief empowers individual actors to make rational decisions, emphasizing self-reliance and freedom from state control. Mirroring carceral ideology, neoconservatives uphold individualism by blaming students and their families for inequities in student achievement, absenteeism and disciplinary disparities. Conservative policy makers favor policies that control student behavior and aim to establish a universal standard for education. This universal standard is achieved through regulation of content (curriculum) and control of student behavior. We outline two key expectations. First, as policy design is a function of the social construction of the school population, we expect that when the student population includes large numbers of Black and low-income students--who have been historically constructed as deviant or dependent--schools will be characterized by more carceral policies. Second, policy design is a reflection of political ideologies within the local community. Specifically, we expect conservative ideology within the community to correspond to more punitive school policies. To test these hypotheses, we examine the extent to which school policies reflect the tools of the carceral state-- including surveillance, coercion, confinement, and correction. To measure carceral ideology, we constructed a school-level measure of carceral ideology based on computational analyses of text from 712 North Carolina school handbooks. As formal policy documents, handbooks are widely accessible, contain relatively standardized content, and convey concise information about schools' values, goals, structure, practices, and intentions. Using a custom dictionary of carceral terms, we constructed a Carceral Ideology (CI) Score as the proportion of handbook sentences containing at least one term related to surveillance, coercion, confinement, or correction to create (See Table 1 in Appendix). Using political party affiliation as a proxy for conservative ideology, we constructed a binary variable equal to one if a plurality of voters within each school's attendance zone registered as Republican (see Figure 1). We find that carceral ideology varies across school characteristics, including charter school status, geographic locale, and population demographics (See Table 3 in Appendix). First, we find a positive, significant relationship between Carceral Ideology (CI) score and the school demographics, including the proportion of students receiving free or reduced lunch and the proportion of Black students (See Table 3 in Appendix). Second, we find that schools located in school attendance zones with a Republican Plurality of voters use more carceral language (See Table 3 in Appendix). Holding other factors constant, being located in a Republican-dominated zone increases the use of carceral language by 8.6%. For schools in conservative regions of the state, discipline rates are higher, but black-white disparities are smaller (See Tables 4 & 5 in Appendix). Our findings denote a need for education policy researchers to further explore and expand on not only school discipline, but also the broader characteristics of school environments. Additionally, surrounding community contexts play a significant role in the development of policies impacting students, specifically, students of color, which can have a detrimental impact on their later life outcomes.