Prisons do more than contain the bodies marked for social liquidation and premature death; they function as an archipelago of learning deserts that simultaneously freeze the accumulation of knowledge, while extracting from captives the compulsory labor slavery was designed to marshal. For those who claim to care about educational inequality, and the intellectual development of marginalized Black folks, knowing that in 2010, 61.8 percent of African Americans on lock lacked a high school diploma or GED, should have sent a social justice shockwave through the corridors of the academy. It didn’t.
Disparities Demand Intervention
Boasting the largest incarcerated population worldwide, and one of the highest incarceration rates, the United States criminal legal system disproportionately tattoos individuals and communities of color. Though Black people only make up 13 percent of the US population, they comprise 37 percent of the 1.8 million people incarcerated nationally (a nearly 3-to-1 disparity); in Connecticut, that overrepresentation has reached a staggeringly racist 8-to-1 ratio. Though white people constitute 58 percent of the overall US population–nearly five times the nation’s Black population—their in-prison representation mirrors the total number of Black bodies held, creating the appearance of parity. Despite the return of Pell grant funding for incarcerated learners to claim after more than half a century of intellectual castration, studies reveal only 27 percent obtain a GED credential, and across more than 40 jurisdiction-wide systems of corrections, college-in-prison programs around the nation enroll less than 5 percent of those aged 16-74 who are eligible for and interested in higher education.
The so-called “achievement gap” in K-12 schools, when lensed by critical race theory, becomes reframed as an “education debt” (historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral), which underscores the historical lack of access to quality education that plagues the majority of low income communities of color that feed the beast. To the extent the presumed purchasing power that the return of Pell funding should afford to captives is not yet realized—student autonomy born from consumer agency should translate to one’s ability to chart and pay for their own learning path—the need for “for-us-by-us,” or FUBU-style critical paradigms of in-community learning, by any means, has become a priority. I have described in-prison classrooms as the “next frontier” of abolitionist engagement, urging radical members of the academy to invade these coveted spaces, and occupy them alongside us, in order to deliver to us the critical prison studies teachings that can insurgently come alive within spaces violence workers cannot intrude.
Though not every in-prison college program functions as it should—we haven’t been able to access a Black Studies/African American Studies course that satisfies the state’s ethnic studies requirement in more than a decade of trying—I still try. For those who cannot travel in-prison to teach—owing to being distanced, or precluded from doing so by virtue of their organizing activities, which results in them being deemed technically “overfamiliar,” and thus, “unfit” for in-person teaching—two options remain. They can either opt-in to online teaching opportunities in states wherein they don’t visit captives, or, they can customize video lectures that are responsive to our questions about their work. In the final analysis, there are no good reasons for abolitionists to deny captives the opportunity to reap the benefits of their life-sustaining teachings, especially when we design, construct, and fund the learning infrastructure ourselves.
When captive scholars hunt embargoed troves of survival knowledge—be it history, geography, political science, women’s studies, or the all-encompassing deconstruction of state power that comprises critical prison studies—the quest demands that every interlocutor be trained in the ways of a philosopher, explorer, ninja, war general, and spy alike. Every insurgent must become proficient in each of these capacities in order to best acquire, safeguard, and repurpose for our collectivized use, the very criminalized information the state prosecutes us for seeking, possessing, and disseminating. Committing so-called thought crimes from confinement requires unflinching accomplices.
The first members of the academy whose allyship I sought to help me conceptualize how best to arm our community with the information the punishment sector works overtime to deny us—Heather Ann Thompson, and Elizabeth Hinton—each responded off the wrip with a radical “yes!” I emailed them separately, and without a cosign from anybody, after more than three decades of fist-fighting a fire that singed my every pursuit of autonomy, asking them to consider how we might best collaborate to form a digital umbilical cord that nourishes the wilted human flowers languishing in the darkest of gardens with scholarship that speaks to our circumstance. On behalf of those who, as Saidiya Hartman so accurately describes, “exist outside the nation, as the stateless, as the dead, as property, as objects and tools, as sentient flesh,” I sought to import the work of radical thinkers, teachers, and organizers as the critical infrastructure ingredients necessary for our formation of the “networks of mutual aid, maroon communities, survival programs, and circles of care” that educate our people. Accessible, and generous—like aunties from a side of the family you knew existed, but had never met—these two gifted women cared enough about our flourishing to do something about it.
Deconstructing Colonial Models
Heather and Elizabeth didn’t just lean in; they thought alongside me, invited me onto group calls, and brainstormed with me about how best to introduce them to those who might not otherwise gain access to their ideas, but need to. They permitted me, an unlettered street urchin, to decide for my community how best to curate their work, and point it into folks for their consumption. Honoring our epistemologies, they never told me what of theirs to deem most important, or tried to steer my choices; rather, they deferred to me, enthusiastically obliged my asks, furnished our pedagogic vision with the introductory notions that might best spur the intellectual curiosity of those most impacted by carceral power, and stood next to me publicly as advisors to affirm our guild’s collective right to occupy practitioner roles from captivity.
Without patronizing my circumstance, and on the strength of my grasp of the issues that animate mass criminalization—as well as my resolve to innovatively resist the proto-genocidal aims of the container that holds me—I was afforded the respect owed a culture carrier working in what Joy James described as the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition, who’d earned the right to shape the proverbial syllabus. They generously trusted me to teach them about what we—those dwelling in carceral cites—most needed from them, in order to introduce to the most people we can, some of those first order ideas that best frame how to think about the forces that shape what I call the “carceral state of being.” Foregrounding issues of power begets the material and ideological analysis of what abolition requires: to, as Dylan Rodriguez teaches us, “critique, interrogate, and transform any system implicated in the oppression of humans.” Remixing Mariame Kaba’s call for us to ask what can we imagine for ourselves, I wondered: What conversations could I instigate if Heather and Elizabeth were the ones talking?
Essentially, because the same Black self-knowledge not being taught in our public schools has become effectively outlawed by the Trump administration, and is largely criminalized as being “dangerous” within American prisons—and therefore a threat to the PIC—every abolitionist is vested in the underground economy of contraband ideas. Now more than ever, we need to become smugglers of the “help” George Jackson said “should come in the form of education… anything of educational value,” which he told Karen Wald was needed to “help politicize the comrades who are not yet relating.” Half a century ago, George was urging that “people on the outside should begin to bombard the prisons” with the culturally sustaining pedagogies that Django Paris and H. Sami Alim argue are needed to preserve the “lifeways of communities who have been and continue to be damaged and erased.” We are those communities.
Essentially, because the same Black self-knowledge not being taught in our public schools has become effectively outlawed by the Trump administration, and is largely criminalized as being “dangerous” within American prisons—and therefore a threat to the PIC—every abolitionist is vested in the underground economy of contraband ideas.
What I didn’t realize at the time, but can now appreciate, is that what I was describing to people as “embargoed knowledge,” and “inside knowledge,” could also be construed as an adult version of the Prison Abolition Literacies practice Rachel McMillian and Nathaniel Bryan have called for in early childhood teaching and curriculum. The same culturally sustaining literacies are the “ghost pedagogies” that evade the young Black men between the ages of 18-25, whose brains are still developing, and lack a viable means by which to nurture their “sociopolitical consciousness about the [PIC] and how it deeply impacts their lives and those of their families and members of their communities.”
Heather and Elizabeth fielded emailed questions, stopped their busy lives to film their video parts, sent them to our technology partners at CSU Stanislaus—shout out to Nathaniel Dahman and the video ninjas—and agreed to advise our grassroots Carceral Studies Journalism Guild (CSJG) community. Each made themselves available for interviews with Editor & Publisher Magazine to discuss the import of our uncensored journalism work, appeared in a PSA supporting our Barz Behind Bars: Healing Through Verse poetry-based literacy workshop from an NYC rooftop, and have centered our right to higher education, by directly participating in our campus life. Elizabeth, and the Justice For Everybody Movement (J4EM) team at Yale University, have traveled to California to support in-prison CSJG events here, while multiple Harvard/Yale PhD candidates actively work alongside us daily.
Their selfless commitment to our FUBU-style pursuit of academic freedom, and justice for everybody, is why more than one million people who stand for count, will get to access the content we curate via the Inside Knowledge digital portal. When members of the academy step away from the campuses where our nation’s most affluent students pay royal sums to learn from them what we cannot otherwise access from confinement, to convey to us the knowledge the system deems forbidden, they become human land bridges of struggle solidarity. Because there is power in proximity, positioning thinkers whose work can serve as brain food allows us to model curiosity for our peers, and activate around the digestion of those nutrients. We are starved of critical teachings the system doesn’t think we deserve to acquire and works overtime to deny us access to—censorship and book bans prevail—and so, outside-in collaborations that function beyond the reach of, and without the permission of the beast, represent a liberatory praxis driven by self-activity that cannot be tamed. Indeed, we never needed the state’s permission to publish, any more than we needed their permission to learn; all we have ever needed are comrades who are committed to teaching us what they already know, and learning with us about how best to build communities that promote our safety and survival.
The Fruit of Criticality
In 2011, while housed at CSP-Calipatria (better known as Killapatria), a comrade in the law library slid me a bootleg photocopy of Dylan Rodriguez’s “The Disarticulation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position,” (Radical Teacher, No. 88), which framed the primary abolitionist question concerning teaching, as “whether and how the act of teaching can effectively and radically displace the normalized misery, everyday suffering, and mundane state violence that are reproduced and/or passively condoned by both hegemonic and critical/counterhegemonic pedagogies.” Owing to how Dylan masterfully identifies the epistemic relation between “the school” and “the prison,” looks beyond “whether or not our teaching supports or adequately challenges the material arrangements and cultural significations of the prison regime,” and focuses upon “those attempts at abolitionist pedagogy that—in an urgent embracing of the historical necessity of innovation, improvisation, and radical rearticulation—are attempting to generate new epistemic and intellectual approaches to meaning, knowledge, learning, and practice for the sake of life, liberation, and new social possibilities,” it remains one of the most influential papers I have ever read in prison.
Whereas the ethical tension of non-reformist reforms has often left my captive comrades wondering whether or not abolition demanded of them that they refuse to partake in the in-prison college experience, Dylan’s refrain made it very clear to us that the radical rearticulation of meaning, knowledge, learning, and practice had to take a front seat to fears about how the prison regime might claim the gains of a properly deployed abolitionist pedagogy. If captives—aspiring abolitionists—are to be trained in the ways of critical resistance, the in-prison college experience should be insurgently harnessed by radical teachers who disseminate the teachings of critical prison studies.
I have made it my personal mission to radically reorient the way we all think about how best to support insurgent communities bubbling on the inside, using tools nobody else was using. The more comrades I meet, the more I learn about the different ways everybody approaches the difficult work of community building, and the limitations that prevent things from moving at the speed and in the manner I might prefer. That said, the things captives covet—safety, knowledge, love, solidarity, agency, and freedom—are made more attainable when our teachers become our collaborators. Black Radical Feminism gave us Abolition, and Abolition gave my life a pedagogical purpose. We are all here to learn from one another, but we must actively devise ways to insurgently teach around the obstacles that have been and will continuously become erected to thwart our transmissions. Our abolitionist teachers must make it a priority to aggressively coordinate the dissemination of their accumulated knowledge to every captive that seeks it. To that end, Inner Views will serve as my collaborative contribution to the conversations I hope more members of the academy—and other nontraditional/unlettered workers in the struggle—will decide to have with us. We are the people most in need of what you know. We are hungry—feed us.
We are all here to learn from one another, but we must actively devise ways to insurgently teach around the obstacles that have been and will continuously become erected to thwart our transmissions. Our abolitionist teachers must make it a priority to aggressively coordinate the dissemination of their accumulated knowledge to every captive that seeks it.
There will come a time when the physical capacity to share knowledge with people in prison will be completely securitized, and largely untenable, absent digital solutions. Whoever you are, if you’re reading this, chances are, your work is MIA behind the wall. Let’s change that.
Heather, thank you for setting an example for the other trophy-holding authors who think they’re too cool for school to stand next to us—you remain the most generous mentor any scholar (on lock, or fresh out of Harvard), could ever hope to know.
Elizabeth, you put your institutional funding, time, and heart into the most critical element of the work—the people who do the work—and you always show up, no matter what.
To watch portions of Inner Views episodes featuring Heather Ann Thompson and Elizabeth Hinton, see their answers to our first questions about their work before. If you are an educator, artist, or subject matter expert interested in sharing your work with captives, email Ghost at ghostinsideknowledge@gmail.com
Inner Views: Professor Elizabeth Hinton, Class of 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies at Yale University
Inner Views: Professor Heather Ann Thompson, Frank W Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan
Professor Heather Ann Thompson answers questions about the origins of her work for the “InnerViews” series. Audio and video edited and produced by Nathaniel Dahman.
