In our recently published post “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” we asked for responses to it. We are collecting those responses on this linked page of the Abolition.University website. The responses we have received so far include: Sharon Stein – Abolitionist Work’s Psycho-affective Dimensions and …
Read moreResponses to “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation”
by Michael Sutcliffe
Education, and particularly literacy, is often held up as a panacea for criminality and the key to prisoners’ reinvented social mobility. Reformers, educators, administrators, and government-funded corporate surveys tell us that if prisoners are educated, their behaviors will change as they learn to “solve their problems” in constructive rather than destructive ways. While much is to be said for the value of education, learning to read and write according to institutionally authorized conventional modes of discourse does little to counter the systems of state-sponsored violence, near-permanent poverty, racism, and devastating economic inequity that propagate the prison industrial complex.
This essay will demonstrate how current applications of prisoner education contribute to a “Prison Literacy Complex” by assuming deficits in the prisoner and positing education as remediation or as therapy. Traditional top-down models of literacy and their “voices-in” pedagogies mask systemic privilege and stratification. Instead, I argue for a “voices-out” pedagogical reframing for community programs in prisons and jails that can further substantive, redistributive social change. By bringing silenced voices and counterhegemonic memories out from behind bars, community efforts can reveal inconsistencies in popular “truths” and inspire the historicized criticism necessary for sustained projects of abolition. While primarily addressed to educators and community organizers working inside, the theoretical reorientation is a broader call for rethinking and reteaching ideological inheritance and community participation.
by Matthew Chrisler
How does participation in Canadian Reconciliation further the colonial governance of Indigenous peoples? This is the central question of Jaskiran Dhillon’s new monograph, Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Tracing the impact of nonprofit programs focused on intervening in the lives of Indigenous youth trapped in circuits of incarceration and social marginalization, Dhillon provides powerful new evidence for what Indigenous scholars and activists have argued is only a kinder, gentler colonialism.
– by David C. Turner III –
Critical Black Youth Politics takes all forms of resistance into account, & suggests that riots are just as important for democratic repair as nonviolent civil disobedience. … Black youth are engaging in forms of activism that deeply connect systems of oppression, especially how these systems are monetized, and no singular theoretical analysis can possibly capture all of it. Our youth are giving us new ways to re-imagine and think about the world: it’s about time we pay attention.
Those of us who want prison abolition must consider a call, simultaneously, to deschool society. This intervention describes how the system of education is complicit in the propagation of neoliberal capitalist imperialism, and also points to the relationship between education, diversity, death and debt.