Tackling the PIC: Successes and Challenges in Teaching the Prison-Industrial Complex

“But they’re criminals. We should lock them up and throw away the key!” my student, using a tired refrain, declared. She soon had a classroom of her peers—thoughtful, engaged students who often enjoyed analyzing complicated and difficult social issues—nodding in support. Thus began my entry into teaching and discussing the prison industrial complex (PIC) and abolitionism in a college classroom. Luckily, the class moved beyond this knee-jerk reaction, but I learned a valuable lesson that day. While I regularly engage students in thinking critically about poverty, social justice, race relations, feminism, and inclusion, exploring the possibilities of abolishing a system of criminalization and imprisonment that seemed so natural and commonplace to them was going to be a new challenge.

To that end, this essay will explore my experiences teaching the PIC in two differently situated classes in order to address what worked well and what did not. As a historian who teaches in women, gender, and sexuality studies, my two very different experiences were driven in large part by how I organized and structured the students’ entrance to and evaluation of this topic. Since I experienced some real success when I taught the PIC the second time around (but not the first), the essay includes some “best practices” to consider when approaching this topic with students who are, at best, uninformed and, at worst, completely resistant to the idea of even recognizing the PIC, much less considering its abolishment.

This essay explores the frameworks in which my teaching of the PIC did and did not work for me in the classroom, including the texts I used, questions we discussed, and assignments that my students and I found most useful. It also examines what kinds of arguments I found to be most compelling in the classroom around the possibilities for abolishing the PIC and what can happen when the prospect of abolition is raised. I also explore how to link the PIC with historical antecedents in order to build an effective groundwork for discussing the PIC, since it has been through this historically-situated framework that I have found the most success and reward in engaging students in the idea of abolition as the solution to the PIC. I also discuss ways to incorporate PIC discussions into other material that intersects with it. I begin by focusing on why I teach the PIC and why my experiences discussing it and prodding students to consider radical acts of resistance have only strengthened my dedication to having these difficult dialogues.

Why Teach the PIC?

Teaching the PIC means challenging how we conceptualize the prison, which, according to scholar Angela Davis, most of us see as “an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives” (Prisons 9). The very title of her work, Are Prisons Obsolete?, is an important question for students to address. Her seminal work provides frameworks for how to best approach this topic with students. Michel Foucault wrote decades ago about the supposedly “self-evident” nature of the prison, and Davis succinctly writes: “the prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (Foucault 232; Prisons 10). As Davis succinctly summarizes, the ideology of the prison “relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism” (Prisons 16). It is for that very reason that we must tackle this topic and these questions with our students.

Creating an environment in which abolition can be raised and seriously contemplated is tantamount to this educational endeavor. I use Davis’s concept of an “abolition democracy,” a definition that incorporates not only tearing down antiquated, racist institutions, but also building new, inclusive ones, as a central organizing theme when teaching the PIC. Students often respond to her insistence upon “the abolition of institutions that advance the dominance of any one group over any other” (Democracy 7, 29, 73). According to Davis, “the prison is one of the most important features of our image environment” (Prisons 18). Thus I begin my classes on the...