Spotlight Learning Collections: Prison Education & Abolitionist Approaches

The personal accounts, educator portraits, and research findings assembled by Darrius A. Stanley in #BlackEducatorsMatter constitute an unstinting exploration of the experiences of Black K-12 teachers in the United States. Spotlighting the invaluable work of Black educators, this volume reveals that although they are underrepresented in educational institutions, they have profound positive influence not only on students of color but also on school climate and ultimately on all of society.

Abolition for the People brings together thirty essays representing a diversity of voices--political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and relatives of those killed by the anti-Black terrorism of policing and prisons. This collection presents readers with a moral choice: "Will you continue to be actively complicit in the perpetuation of these systems," Kaepernick asks in his introduction, "or will you take action to dismantle them for the benefit of a just future?"

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

Abolition Labor chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate--even incompatible--political projects. Leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century.

This book outlines several different approaches to penal abolitionism and showcases their calls for the ending of legal coercion, domination, and repression. This collection shows how abolitionist ideas have continued topicality and relevance in the present day and how they can collectively help with devising new ways of thinking about social problems, as well as suggesting alternatives to existing penal policies, practices and institutions.

Sociologist David Harding and criminologist Heather Harris provide a comprehensive account of young men's experiences of reentry and reintegration in the era of mass incarceration.

Working from collections at the Southern California Library (Black Panthers, LA Chapter; the Coalition Against Police Abuse; Urban Policy Research Institute; Mothers Reclaiming Our Children; and the collection of geographer Clyde Woods), this book builds upon theories of the archive to examine carcerality as the dominant mode of state governance over Black populations in the United States since the 1960s.

American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

This timely manual presents a new perspective on teaching and learning focused on countering the impacts of trauma on adults' ability to learn. Within its detailed and useful approaches, Daniels provides a road map for building a trauma-responsive teaching practice grounded in the principles of Trauma-Informed Care, and emphasizing the need for educators to develop a rigorous practice of self-care.

A collection which represents years of struggle in the transgender, gender variant and queer liberation movements and the movement for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Often discriminated against and harassed on the outside, time in prison can be especially difficult for this already marginalised group of people who may exist between the prison system's male/female institutions.

With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.

Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black.

A revealing account of the entrenched inequities that harm our most vulnerable students and what colleges can do to help them excel. Class Dismissed paints an intimate and unflinchingly candid portrait of the challenges of undergraduate life for disadvantaged students even in elite schools that invest millions to diversify their student body.

College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities.

This book is the first comprehensive overview of police divestment, using international examples and case studies to reimagine community safety beyond policing and imprisonment. Showcasing a range of practical examples, this topical book will be relevant for academics, policy makers, activists and all those interested in the Black Lives Matter movement, protest movements and the renewed interest in policing and abolitionism more generally.

The first authoritative volume to look back on the last 50 years of The Open University providing higher education to those in prison, this unique book gives voice to ex-prisoners whose lives have been transformed by the education they received. Offering vivid personal testimonies, reflective vignettes and academic analysis of prison life and education in prison, the book marks the 50th anniversary of The Open University.

'Desistance' - understanding how people move away from offending - has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children, many of whom are yet to fully develop an identity (criminal or otherwise) from which to 'desist'.

Detention and its Alternatives under International Law analyses the current state of the international law on detention and its alternatives within national law and policy. It addresses armed conflict, counterterrorism, criminal justice, mental health, migration, public health, and social care.

This book offers an uncompromising and rigorous analysis of education and human rights by examining issues related to gender, race, sexuality, disability, and social class. Written as a companion to the very successful U.K. version, this volume reflects the economic, political, social, and cultural changes in educational and political policy and practice in the United States.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice--even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

This fascinating book explores the abolitionist ideas of key early socialists and anarchists, writing from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. It considers how these radical thinkers can provide insights into our present condition, both by highlighting the harms of punishment and by pointing to inspiring alternatives to current policy and practice.

The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them.

In this scintillating, comprehensive study, Ricordeau draws from two decades as an abolitionist activist and scholar of the penal justice system to describe how the criminal justice system hurts women. Considering the position of survivors of violence, criminalized women, and women with criminalized relatives, Ricordeau charts a new path to emancipation without incarceration.

Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they've paid their debt to society. Informed by Miller's experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail.

Feminist philosophers Barrett Emerick and Audrey Yap bring theoretical arguments about personhood and moral repair into conversation with the work of activists and the experiences of incarcerated people to make the case that prisons ought to be abolished. They argue that contemporary carceral systems in the United States and Canada fail to treat people as genuine moral agents in ways that also fail victims and their larger communities.

Disability justice and prison abolition are two increasingly popular theories that overlap but whose intersection has rarely been explored in depth. A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice explains the history and theories behind abolition and disability justice in away that is easy to understand for those new to these concepts yet also gives insights that will be useful to seasoned activists.

Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.

Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families.A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.

Prison Pedagogies does not champion any one prescriptive approach to writing education but instead recognizes a wide range of possibilities. Essay subjects include working-class consciousness and prison education; community and literature writing at different security levels in prisons; organized writing classes in jails and juvenile halls; cultural resistance through writing education; prison newspapers and writing archives as pedagogical resources; dialogical approaches to teaching prison writing classes; and more.

Making use of life-history interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic fieldwork with low-income urban residents of color, primarily Black men, Calvin John Smiley finds that reentry requires the recently released to negotiate a web of disjointed and often contradictory systems that serveas an extension of the carceral system.

Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose complex lives are misunderstood, highly judged--by teachers, administrators, and the justice system--and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Also available as a streaming film (see above).

This book calls for an equitable and qualitative access to education for all. It proposes paradigms of educational governance that are based on coalition building between key stakeholders, are grounded in local and cultural contexts, sensitive to the language needs of communities.

This timely, readable text offers an authoritative and balanced analysis of how racially driven policies in America impact post release education as a leading pathway to social reintegration. Compelling research findings from an assemblage of college faculty, seasoned administrators, and criminal justice professionals are interwoven with first-person narratives from formerly incarcerated individuals.

Using concepts and ideas from liberal political philosophy, Martin shows that access to educational goods play a key role in helping citizens realize their self-determined goals. Higher education should be understood as a basic social institution responsible for ensuring that all citizens can access these goods. The necessary corrective, Martin argues, is simple: we need to stop allocating higher education to some, and allocate it to all who choose to pursue it.

Educational justice advocate and educator Deonna Smith delivers a unique blend of theory, academic frameworks, narrative, and digestible advice on impacting deeply rooted school culture challenges and managing the day-to-day classroom. This research-based book brings a friendly and accessible voice to a complex issue, making the subject matter easy to follow and apply in the real world.

Peter W. Cookson, Jr., lays out a blueprint for providing equitable educational opportunities for students from all socioeconomic strata, and particularly for the five million American children who live with the extreme material hardship known as deep poverty. This work issues an urgent call to action for K-12 schools to put in place the policies, practices, and programs that enable economically vulnerable students to thrive.

Williamson and Appleman, along with a collection of scholars, teacher educators, K-12 teachers, an administrator, and an incarcerated student, offer their perspectives on how schooling can be restructured to disrupt this flow and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

Thurston Domina, Andrew M. Penner, and Emily K. Penner, explore processes of educational categorization in order to explain the complex relationship between education and social inequality--and to identify strategies that can help build more just educational systems. While some educational categorization may be unavoidable, the authors suggest ways to build a more equitable system--and thus a more equitable society.

The Sentences That Create Us provides a road map for incarcerated people and their allies to have a thriving writing life behind bars--and shared beyond the walls--that draws on the unique insights of more than fifty contributors, most themselves justice-involved, to offer advice, inspiration and resources.

Dr. Crystal Belle challenges traditional educational practices and offers a new approach to teaching rooted in radical love and social justice. Combining research with personal experiences and interviews, Dr. Belle explores the roots and practical application of a social justice education framework grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT), heart healing, educator beliefs, and a deep understanding of the structural inequities in education.

Richard O. Welsh takes on the school discipline crisis in Suspended Futures, delineating the persistent racial disparities in how educators perceive and respond to the behavior of students. Welsh offers a framework for disrupting and dismantling a disciplinary system that disproportionately disadvantages students of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous identities.

Showcasing original artwork, this book shows readers how to use arts-infused writing pedagogies to create socially transformative educational spaces. Envisioned as a story, a guide, a resource, and an aesthetic experience, this book features the work of a multigenerational collective of K-12 educators, students, and teaching artists seeking educational justice.

Written by activists and scholars based in Australia, Kenya, Pakistan, New Zealand, South Africa, Uganda and the USA, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Prison Education offers the first global state-of-the-field overview of research into educational practices and programs in prisons.

This book examines the criminalization of Black men and the need for penal system reform that allows for their mental, physical, financial, and emotional rehabilitation. Provides recommendations on how to change the narrative of incarcerated Black males in America to help them survive and thrive outside of prison.

A former parole officer shines a bright light on a huge yet hidden part of our justice system through the intertwining stories of seven parolees striving to survive the chaos that awaits them after prison in this illuminating and dramatic book. The Second Chance Club shows us how to solve the cruelest problems prisons create for offenders and society at large.

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women's House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.

In this sensible and sensitive assessment of science instruction in the United States, Morales-Doyle outlines both what science education is and what it could be. He suggests that a judicious shift in the field's goals and methods--for example, incorporating practice-based teacher education, justice-centered science pedagogy, and youth participatory science--could give all students, not just those preparing for STEM careers, opportunities to be engaged with the sciences, with their communities, and in the world.

In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba's work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world.

A vital anthology exploring the intersections between caregiving and abolition. In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom-not merely reform-teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist.