Educational and Abolitionist Interventions in the Carceral State

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This roundtable brings together scholars and activists who have engaged the carceral state through both educational and abolitionist interventions inside prisons. Prison education programs vary greatly: some offer credit-bearing college courses, while others offer courses that bear no credit and simply introduce students to the experience of the college class. Some programs follow an inside-out model which brings non-incarcerated students into contact with incarcerated ones. Yet others ensure that incarcerated students are admitted as regular students of the college/university, and are offered a degree, rather than simply credit-bearing courses with no degree pathway. This roundtable brings together scholar-activists with the goal of exploring a range of questions pertaining to these different models, while also addressing the implications of different funding models for such programs. It also seeks to showcase a range of interventions in mass incarceration beyond such educational programs. How do scholarship and activism intersect in these interventions? How do reformist and abolitionist impulses collide as scholar-activists juggle ameliorative and transformative motivations? By including at least one formerly-incarcerated participant, the roundtable seeks to showcase collaborations and co-authorship between incarcerated and non-incarcerated scholars. It speaks to the conference theme through an exploration of the deep social, racial, economic and political inequities that are sustained and reproduced through the carceral state, and interrogates whether and how such in-prison initiatives can address these inequities. It also speaks to the possibilities that exist within newer, experimental paths toward social, racial and economic justice that take root from the ground-up. These initiatives operate from inside the carceral state, reimagining democratic practices that emerge from marginalized, underrepresented and silenced voices, from those forced to experience the most undemocratic and authoritarian facets of state and social power.

Sub Unit

• Division 42: Critical Political Science (formerly New Political Science)

Chair

• Farah Godrej University of California, Riverside

Presenters

• Anna M. Terwiel Trinity College

• Farah Godrej University of California, Riverside

• Mneesha Gellman Emerson College

• Nazli Konya Colby College

• Victoria Scott

• Laura Grattan Wellesley College

• Justin McDevitt University of Notre Dame