Search Results (12)

Endemic racism, operationalized through exclusionary discipline practices contributes to the “spirit murdering” of youth of color in schools. While the school-to-prison pipeline frames the funneling of students into the (in)justice system, the school-to-prison nexus expands this understanding by interrogating the reality that schools are prison for many. Thus, education abolitionists call for a systemic account of “schooling” to embrace creative risk and radical possibility in the pursuit of liberation. However, existing literature has not substantively centered the voices of youth directly involved in these carceral systems, nor invited them to dream. This study asks: based on formerly incarcerated students’ experiences in school and prison, what must educational systems do to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline? Guided by qualitative methods, we conducted semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated college students (four women, two men; majority Latinx/Hispanic) and conducted member checking. Our reflexive thematic analysis uncovered a troubling truth: schools frequently ignored and misinterpreted trauma, grief, and internalized pain among high school students. Participants described internal battles (i.e., mental health challenges) that often showed up externally as “behaviors” (e.g., fighting, skipping school, substance use) that resulted in exclusionary discipline. Equally important, participants re-imagined schools as homeplaces—sites of care, belonging, and agency. These narratives illuminate the need to dismantle punitive systems, center insights from those at the center of the experiences, and build just, loving, and equitable schools. Full article

Social work has long operated at the intersection of care and control—nowhere is this more apparent than in its treatment of sex-working parents. This article draws on participatory research with thirteen sex-working parents in California to examine how the child welfare system, family court, and public benefit infrastructures extend punitive surveillance under the guise of support. Utilizing the framework of prison industrial complex abolition, the analysis identifies three key findings: first, family policing systems often mirror the coercive dynamics of abusive relationships that sex work helped participants to escape; second, access to social services is contingent on the performance of respectability, with compliance met not with care but with suspicion and deprivation; and third, sex-working parents enact abolitionist praxis by creating new systems of safety and stability through mutual aid when state systems fail. As social work reckons with its complicity in the carceral state, the everyday practices of sex-working parents offer a powerful blueprint for care rooted in trust, unconditional positive regard, and self-determination. Full article

The vast majority of people in U.S. women’s prisons are survivors of interpersonal violence, a pattern that organizers and advocates have referred to as the abuse-to-prison pipeline. This article critically examines criminal prosecution from the perspectives of survivors of interpersonal violence who faced long prison sentences in California. In-depth interviews and group discussions were generated through a participatory process at a gathering to launch the University of California Sentencing Project, a partnership with the community-based organization California Coalition for Women Prisoners. The twenty-two formerly incarcerated participants had collectively spent more than 300 years imprisoned. Drawing on their lived experiences spanning several decades and multiple jurisdictions, this article offers an unyielding account of tactics of isolation, intimidation, narrative manipulation, and confinement as definitional to prosecutorial practice and culture. This criminalized survivor-centered analysis of prosecution shows how one of the most robustly funded public interventions for interpersonal violence is not merely failing to protect victims but is protracting patterns of abuse and coercive control. Implications are discussed in terms of social care work and collective defense rooted in abolition feminism. Full article

Prisons in the United States serve as a site and embodiment of gendered and racialized state violence. The US incarcerates more people than any other nation in both numbers and per capita rates. Individuals incarcerated in women’s prisons are 10% of the total prison population, yet women’s prisons remain understudied, and the violence that occurs in women’s facilities is rampant, widespread, and operates in particular racialized and gendered ways. This paper centers the forced sterilizations that occurred in California state prisons over the last two decades. We consider how reproduction and the nuclear family have served as a primary site of racial capitalism and eugenic ideology. While eugenic policies were popularized and promoted across the US and globally in the 20th century, the violent ideas underlying eugenic ideology have been a constant presence throughout US history. The height of the eugenics era is marked by the forcible sterilization of institutionalized ‘deviant’ bodies. While discussions of eugenics often center these programs, the reach of eugenic policies extends far beyond surgical interventions. We utilize a reproductive justice lens to argue that the hierarchical, racialized social stratification necessary for the existence of prisons constructs and sustains the ‘deviant’ bodies and families that predicate eugenic logic, policies, and practices. In this conceptual paper, we draw from ongoing research to argue that prisons, as institutions and as a product of racial capitalism, perpetuate the ongoing violent legacy of eugenics and name abolition as a central component of the fight to end reproductive oppression. Full article

In this article, I explore performances of letter writing within the archives of the London-based theatre company Clean Break, who work with justice-experienced women and women at risk. Clean Break’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London contains an extensive collection of production ephemera and letters. Charting the company’s development across forty years of theatre productions, public advocacy, and work in prisons and community settings, these materials of the archive—strategic documents, annotated playscripts and rehearsal notes, production photography and correspondence—reveal the acute importance of the letter to people living on the immediate borderlands of the prison. Despite these generative resonances, however, the epistolary form is very rarely used in Clean Break’s theatre: as the archive reveals, since the company was founded by two women in HM Prison Askham Grange in 1979, stagings of letters have occurred in only a handful of instances. In this archival exploration of the epistolary in three works by Clean Break—a film broadcast by the BBC, a play staged at the Royal Court, and a circular chain-play written by women in three prisons—I investigate what lifeworlds beyond prison epistolary forms in performance propose. Full article

This paper provides a genealogical overview of discourses pertaining to emancipation within Islamic thought. I demonstrate how classical Islamic scholarship developed a tradition in which a clear emancipatory ethic can be located. Further, I explore how emancipation came to be read as anticipating the abolition of slavery in the contemporary period through focusing on the work of Muhammad Abduh. Finally, I discuss the potential engagements between Islamic notions of emancipation and contemporary discourses pertaining to prison abolition. I argue that the strong emancipatory ethic found within the classical legal tradition would not abide by the exploitative prison systems found across various nations. Engaging Islamic law through a Liberation Theology framework, I claim that a serious engagement with prison abolition discourses is a natural continuation for a tradition with such a strong precedent of emancipatory impetus. Full article

The problem of child sexual abuse (CSA) is a crucial point of entry into abolition-feminist conversations about justice and punishment, healing and repair. The popular belief that the “child sex offender” is uniquely irredeemable, eternally depraved and dangerous can trouble abolition-feminist efforts to address the devastating harm of CSA without reproducing the violence of prison and punishment. It also forces us to return to the question of “what to do with the dangerous few?” A familiar “tough on crime” refrain, this question mystifies the social, economic, and political conditions that nurture interpersonal violence. It also illustrates how centering our attention on “the monster in our midst” feeds an attachment to the mistaken belief that sexual harm is locatable in individual, bad people; that it is fixable by criminal law, and, in short, that justice and repair can be measured by the number of years one is sentenced to live behind bars. Miguel Piñero’s 1972 play “Short Eyes” exposes the failure of our attempts to incarcerate our way out of child sexual abuse and opens a literary-artistic space in which to explore the roots of violence and the abuse of power. The play dramatizes the particular ways in which the incarceration of those deemed the worst of the worst does not alleviate suffering or promote safety; rather, it prevents us from getting to the root of even the most horrific forms of abuse and from fully engaging, confronting and, finally, interrupting the daily, quotidian acts of sexual violence that are hiding in plain sight. Full article

The development of the primarily women-of-color-led movement for transformative justice has also shed light on the fact that abolition requires not just the transformation of social relations and place, but the transformations of subjectivity itself. This movement recognizes that violence is not just enacted against oppressed communities but is enacted with them, and hence the line between those who harm and those who face harm is often illusory. The movement for transformative justice—for accountability without disposability—calls on us to create different systems of relationality, which, in turn, transform who we think we are as people. Essentially, we are required to embark on an uncharted journey that will result in the creation of new selves we would not now recognize. Abolition can be seen as a process and a methodology rather than a presumed destination. To identify abolitionist methodologies, it can be helpful to look at unexpected places rather than presume that some spaces and peoples are necessarily more abolitionist than others. Consequently, this essay will look at abolitionism in an unexpected place, Christian evangelicalism. Full article

In Italy, a person suffering from a mental disorder who commits a crime will be given a custodial security order and serve the period of admission at a Residenza per la esecuzione delle misure di sicurezza (REMS) (Residence for the Execution of Security Measures, hereinafter “REMS”). These institutions have been established recently and though equipped with the necessary safety measures, the focus is on psychiatric therapy. Despite being present on a national scale, access is very limited in terms of capacity. Immediate remedial measures are needed, so much so that the European Court of Human Rights recently condemned Italy for this very reason. This article, through a review of the constitutive principles of these institutions, shows how they have very positive aspects such as the attention to necessary psychotherapy in order to protect the right to health and the real taking charge of the fragility of the subjects; however, it is seen how there are many negative aspects linked above all to the scarce availability of places in these structures. The article provides suggestions on a more comprehensive strategy for facilities for detainees with mental disorders. Full article

In this Critical Yoga Studies (CYS) examination, I introduce terms, “racial tourism,” and “racial mobility,” and a method, “justice storytelling.” These terms and this method are poised to be used strategically in the quest to grapple with race and racial fraud in the academy. Racial fraud in the academy is exemplified by, but not limited to, infamous scholars such as Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, Andrea Smith, Elizabeth Warren, and BethAnn McLaughlin. The terms “racial mobility” and “racial tourism,” intentionally create space in which to notice and assess racial fraud. In establishing CYS, I aim to provide epistemic space in which pause the cycle of harm (ie. instigated by exposure to racial fraud in the academy) and reaction (outrage, condemnation) and make space to notice, witness, and be (“this is happening”). The terms, method, and guiding questions offered in this study create epistemic space to notice race, to continue to be despite racism, and assess the ongoing project of racial categorizations in order to quell disorientation that results from harm. I add these terms to the basket of more highly circulating terms (such as “cultural appropriation,” and “identity fraud”) used to describe and respond to: (1) the specific phenomenon of white scholars engaging in racial fraud, and (2) the broader experience of living with and within inseparable systems of race, racial categorizations, and racism in the ivory tower. CYS is grounded in legal scholarship and critical race theory. I build on “legal storytelling” in an experimental, poetic form I call, “justice storytelling,” which enables healing. I find the terms I introduce, “racial tourism” and “racial mobility,” reveal a state of movement at the essence of the racial takings and accumulation of racial value enacted by white scholars committed to racial appropriation and fraudulently coding as Black, brown, and Indigenous in the academy. Full article

This article makes the case that the student-centered learning paradigm that I have aimed to establish at Parchman/Mississippi State Penitentiary as a member of a college-in-prison program represents a prison abolition pedagogy that builds on Martin Luther King and Angela Y. Davis’s coalitional models of abolition work. Drawing from Davis’s abolition-framed conception of teaching in jails and prisons as expressed in her autobiography and her critical prison studies text Are Prisons Obsolete?, I argue that the learning environments that I create collaboratively with students at Parchman similarly respond to incarcerated students’ institution-specific concerns and African-American literary interests in ways that lessen, if only temporarily, the social isolation and educational deprivation that they routinely experience in Mississippi’s plantation-style state penitentiary. Moreover, I am interested in the far-reaching implications of what I have theorized elsewhere as “abolition pedagogy”—a way of teaching that exposes and opposes the educational deprivation, under-resourced and understaffed learning environments, and overtly militarized classrooms that precede and accompany too many incarcerations. As such, this article also focuses on my experience of teaching about imprisonment in African-American literature courses at the University of Mississippi at the same time that I have taught classes at Parchman that honor the African-American literary interests of imprisoned students there. Full article

On February 8, 1971, Michel Foucault announced the formation of Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group [GIP]), a group of activist intellectuals who worked to amplify the voices of those with firsthand knowledge of the prison—reflected in their motto, “Speech to the detainees!” In highlighting and circulating subjugated knowledges from within prisons, the GIP not only pursued political and material interventions, but also called for epistemological and methodological shift within intellectual labor about prisons. This essay turns to the work of the GIP, and philosophical reflection on that work, as a resource for contemporary theological methodology. Counter to the optimistic and positive trend in theological turn to practices, this essay draws on Foucault’s work with and reflection on the GIP to argue for a negative theology of practice, which centers on practice (those concrete narratives found in any lived theological context) while, at the same time, sustaining its place in the critical moment of self-reflection; this means theology exposes itself to the risk of reimagining, in the double-movement of self-critique and other-reponse, what theology is. In order to harness and tap into its own moral, abolitionist imagination, this essay argues that theology must risk (paradoxically) and pursue (ideally) its own abolition—it must consider practices outside of its own theological and ecclesial frameworks as potential sources, and it must attend closely, critically, and continually to the ways that Christian practices, and accounts of them, perpetuate and produce harm. Full article