A Teaching Collaboration with a Prison Writer

JOSH MACPHEE JUST SEEDS

A few years ago, Bruce Franklin (2008a) challenged the readership of Radical Teacher to teach about the global prison industrial complex. He boldly stated that “any radical teacher who is not teaching today about the American prison is like a radical teacher who was not teaching in the 1850s about American slavery” (25). Consistent with this call, Radical Teacher has given ample space to the subject of prison, most notably the special issue on teaching against the prison industrial complex and on teaching prison abolition. More recently, Larson (2011) persuasively argued the need to couple these efforts with work that contributes to “abolition from within,” and uses the example of his creative writing workshop as a space for creating “convict citizens” capable of contributing to abolition goals from inside the prison.

I would like to add to this discussion by describing another example of abolition from within: a teaching collaboration between a college professor and a prison writer. Although originally conceived simply as a mutually educative experience, I have come to see its potential as an abolitionist project. Acknowledging the power of the words of prisoners, elevating the convict writer to the status of expert, and inviting a prisoner to serve as a teacher, I argue, is a subversive project useful to the prison abolition movement. It snips one thread in the seemingly impenetrable web of the prison industrial complex by upending the conventional order of whose knowledge is valuable and by supporting a prisoner’s journey toward critical citizenship.

The Context

I teach Prison History & Culture as an upper-level, elective, sociology course at a small, Midwestern liberal arts college. The course fits with the department’s goal to empower students to critically analyze on a macro and micro level the major institutions in society and examine how power within those institutions is mediated by social class, race, and gender. Typical students are 18–21 years old, Caucasian, and economically privileged.

The majority of students enter the class with little direct experience with the criminal justice system and the bulk of their knowledge is based on the media and popular culture. The majority come with the assumption that prison is the solution to the crime problem rather than a problem in and of itself. The prison industrial complex, prison slavery, mass incarceration, entrepreneurial corrections, the collateral damage of the prison industry, and convict disenfranchisement are terms foreign to my students’ intellectual repertoire and experience. Few have read the academic literature on prisons. None have fathers in prison. No one’s brother is a correctional officer. Few have been arrested. What this all means is that unlike Barraclough (2010) and Ooten (2010), teaching about prison abolition must be the ending point rather than the starting point for me. Therefore, the semester moves from an historical development of prisons that culminates in today’s prison industrial complex, to what life is like in prison from the perspective of prisoners, to anti-prison activism and the abolition movement.

The Course

Prison History & Culture is a broad survey of prisons in the United States from their inception to the present day. We consider how conceptualizations of prison, theories of punishment, and institutional practices have changed over time and how, despite historical variation, prisons remain a unique and powerful form of social control. Because prisons control the lives of particular populations more than others (i.e., young, inner-city African American men) we use the intersection between racism, classism, and hegemonic masculinity as a central analytic frame. We ask the following questions and turn to a diverse set of voices (e.g., prisoners, prison activists, criminologists) to find answers: How does prison exacerbate existing race and class inequalities? Why are certain accounts of the historical development of prisons in this country accepted more than others? What is the prison industrial complex? Why are prisons considered big business and who benefits from them? Is it accurate to say that prison actually creates crime? What is driving prison overcrowding? In addition, we explore prison life and...