Prison Logics and Abolition Futures

Here is a copy of my Prison Logics and Abolition Futures syllabus. This syllabus was heavily inspired by the Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0, found HERE. I've added questions to guide individual reading or group discussion. Where useful, I've also included links to my lecture slides. Many of these readings can be found online or through your public library - underlined text indicates a hyperlink or download. If a pay wall stands between you and any of these readings, please contact me.

UNIT 1 - Theories and Origins of Punishment

Day One - What is Mass Incarceration?

Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Prison Policy Initiative, "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018"
Recommended: Angela Davis interview with Democracy Now
Recommended: Explore data provided by the Prison Policy Initiative and Bureau of Justice Statistics

Lecture Slides HERE

Day Two - What is Crime? What is Punishment? What is "The Criminal"?

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments - Read Chapters 1-6 and 12
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How does Beccaria define crime, law, punishment, and society? What methods of thought and reasoning does he rely on? What logical and moral assumptions do his arguments rely on? Do you see any of these ideas in US society today? Where?
Colin Dayan, “Civil Death” from The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What does it mean to be made into a slave, prisoner, or criminal? How are the categories slave, prisoner, and criminal made flesh and bone? By what cultural logics, scripts, and rituals? What is civil death?
VIDEO: Felony Disenfranchisement
Recommended: Caleb Smith, "Civil Death and Carceral Life" from The Prison and the American Imagination
Recommended: Phillip Smith, Punishment and Culture

Day Three - The Prison as Disciplinary, Pt. 1

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Read the section "Panopticism" of Part Three "Discipline." Skim the other two sections "Docile bodies" and "The means of correct training".
Recommended: Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon and Other Prison Writings (Verso, 1995).
Recommended: Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History trans. Jonathan Kneight (New York: New Press, The, 2003), Introduction; 5–22; 50–69; 70–84.
Recommended: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Part One "Torture" and Part Two "Punishment"

Lecture Slides HERE

Day Four - The Prison as Disciplinary, Pt. 2

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Read Part Four "Prison" - Focus on "The Carceral."
Recommended: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Part One "Torture" and Part Two "Punishment"

Lecture Slides HERE

Day Five - The Prison and Racist State Violence, aka Foucault Was Wrong!!

Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment & Prison Abolition”
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How have crime and punishment been racialized in the US? Consider the relationship between method and theory. In which histories does Foucault base his theory of punishment? In which histories does Davis base her theory of punishment? How do Foucault’s and Davis’ theories of punishment differ? How does their difference in method also produce different models for political response or activism?
Alford, C. F. (2000). What would it matter if everything Foucault said about prison were wrong? Discipline and Punish after twenty years. Theory and Society, 29(1), 125–146.
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: Was everything Foucault said about prison wrong? How so? How are mechanisms of discipline (the gaze, panopticon, time-tables, classification, managed bodies) absent from prison? So what? What does it matter? Again, consider the relationship between method and theory? According to Alford, how do his methods of research differ from Foucault and why is this important? Do you agree? Why or why not?
Recommended: Simone Browne, "Introduction" and "Everybody's Got a Little Light Under the Sun" in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

UNIT 2 - The History of US Mass Incarceration and Anti-Prison Rebellion

Day Six - Settler Colonialism, Racial Capitalism, and the Origins of Prison

Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 - Introduction and Chapters 1-2
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What has been the relationship between crime, punishment, race, settler colonialism, land, and labor in US history? How has incarceration been a tool of elimination? How has this been similar and/or different across different targeted populations?
VIDEO: Boots Riley Explains Racial Capitalism

Lecture Slides HERE

Day Seven - The Origins of Immigration "Detention"

Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 - Chapters 3 and 5
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How have the legal and social status of (im)migrants affected their experience of crime and punishment in the US history? What does immigration have to do with settler colonialism? How has elimination worked in relation to immigration? How has this been structurally similar to and/or different from other settler colonial projects of elimination?
Recommended: Nayan Shah. 2005. “Between ‘Oriental Depravity’ and ‘Natural Degenerates’: Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans” American Quarterly, 57(3): 703-725.
Recommended: Chapters 4 and 6 in City of Inmates

Day Eight - The Deep Roots of Mass Incarceration

13th, directed by Ava DuVernay (Kandoo Films, 2016)
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How did we get here? How has racialized punishment shifted and persisted across US history? What questions about the past, about history, and about long-standing social structures does the documentary bring up for you!
Ida B. Wells, “The Convict Lease System.” 1893.
Talitha Leflouria, “The Gendered Anatomy of ‘Negro Crime’” from Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How was “Negro crime” conceptualized and acted upon? Through what institutions and actors? How have crime (or criminalization) and punishment been racialized AND gendered and sexualized? Keep in mind legal punishment and extra-legal violence. What have been the connections between crime, punishment, race, gender, and labor/capitalism? How have Black women resistedthe social order in which they lived? What is the discourse of respectability? What are its connections to law, crime, punishment, race, gender, sex, labor, and/or social dis/order?
VIDEO: The Adult-ification (and Criminalization) of Black Girls
Recommended: Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Reprint edition (New York: Anchor, 2009). (Introduction: 1-12)
Recommended: Library of Congress, “Convict Lease System.”
Recommended: Slavery by Another Name, directed by Sam Pollard (PBS, 2012)
Recommended: “Slavery by Another Name,” website.

Day Nine - A History of Criminalizing Blackness

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Where Did All the White Criminals Go?: Reconfiguring Race and Crime on the Road to Mass Incarceration,” Souls 13, no. 1 (March 18, 2011): 72–90,
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America - Introduction
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How has criminality been conceived in relation to race, gender, and immigration? Who have been considered “deserving” vs “undeserving criminals”? How have “science” and “objective facts” been used by projects of social order and resistance?
Recommended: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America - Chapter 3

VIDEO: Brief Video on the Idea of Race as a Historical Construction

Day Ten - Mid-20th C. Crime and Punishment, aka Liberals Will Not Save Us!!

Naomi Murakawa, First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America - Chapters 1 and 3
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How have liberals in US history conceptualized race, racism, and/or racial justice? Justice versus administration?
Recommended: Naomi Murakawa, First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America - Chapters 2 and 4

Day Eleven - Prisoner Resistance

Robert Chase, "We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoner's Rights Movements," The Journal of American History 102,1 (2015): 73-86.
Queer Fire: The George Jackson Brigade, Men Against Sexism, and Gay Struggle Against Prison - "Men Against Sexism"
Vikki Law, "Overview" in Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2009).
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: Before your read: What comes to mind when you hear the words “prisoner resistance”? Why? While you read: Who are the agents of resistance? What is the object of resistance? What are the strategies of resistance? Individual and collective? What are the barrier to resistance? Individual and collective? What are the goals? What are the outcomes?
VIDEO: The 2018 National Prison Strike
Recommended: Queer Fire: The George Jackson Brigade, Men Against Sexism, and Gay Struggle Against Prison - Read "Introduction" and "A Brief History of the George Jackson Brigade"
Recommended: Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford University Press, 1994).
Recommended: The Suyama Project, Digital Archive of Japanese American Resistance to Incarceration.

Day Twelve - The Political Economy of Prisons, aka Private Prisons are NOT the Root Problem!! Racial Capitalism Is!!

"Crisis and Surplus” in "Golden Gulag" by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. p. 55-57
- Extra: Mini Video Lecture by Will on Crisis and Surplus (Unfortunately, I have only figured out how to share access with UW-affiliated folks.)
- Extra: Video on Marx's Theory of Class Conflict
Gilmore, R. W. (1999). Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism. Race & Class, 40(2-3), 171–188.
Anne Bonds, “Building Prisons, Building Poverty: Prison Sitings, Dispossession, and Mass Incarceration,” in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, ed. Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 129–42
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What explains the prison boom of the 1970s? How does Gilmore’s approach and her explanation differ from and respond to other dominant explanations? How do both Gilmore and Bonds implicitly or explicitly illustrate connections across lines of class, race, and location? Can you see yourself or your communities in these connections? What political possibilities for change do these connections suggest?
Recommended: Gilmore, R.W., Golden Gulag.
Recommended: Prison Town Comix by The Real Cost of Prisons Project

Lectures Slides (including a game about crisis and surplus!) HERE

Day Thirteen - More Political Economy of Prisons

Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism - "Policing as Plunder"
Recommended: Angela Davis, "The Prison Industrial Complex" in Are Prisons Obsolete?
VIDEO: The Recent US Supreme Court Decision on High Fines and Civil Asset Forfeiture (VERY relevant to reading!)
Recommended: Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland
Recommended: Michael J. Love, excerpt from “The Prison-Industrial Complex: An Investment in Failure,” May 1998.

Day Fourteen - Prison Society Beyond Prison Walls, aka Movies are Fun!!

Brett Story, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (Grasshopper Films, 2017).
Recommended: Knotted Line, website
Recommended: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes "Learn More" Webpage
Recommended: "Forum: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes"

UNIT 3 - Prison Reform and Abolition

Day Fifteen - What is Prison Abolition?

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? - Chapters 1, 3, and 6
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What is prison abolition? As a way of thinking about the world? As a set of concrete goals and strategies? What is the place of reform within a prison abolitionist framework? Before you read, ask yourself “What do you think about abolishing prisons?” After you read, ask one friend of family member “What do you think about abolishing prisons?”
VIDEO: Dean Spade and Reina Gossett Four Part Series (Really accessible!)
VIDEO: Dean Spade and Reina Gossett Follow-up (Again, really accessible!)
Recommended: "Think prison abolition in America is impossible? It once felt inevitable"

Day Sixteen - Resisting the Innocence/Guilt Binary

Jackie Wang, "Against Innocence" in Carceral Capitalism
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What is the “politics of innocence”? What are its effects? What keeps it in place or reproduces it? Why is Wang “against innocence”? Do you see the “politics of innocence” in your own life?
Prison Abolition in Practice: The LEAD Project, The Politics of Healing, and "A New Way of Life" Setsu Shigematsu, Gwen D'Arcangelis, and Melissa Burch
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How do LEAD and NWOL put abolitionist principles into practice? Where do you abolitionist principles or practice in their work?
Recommended: Laura McTighe, with Deon Haywood. “Front Porch Revolution: Resilience Space, Demonic Grounds, and the Horizons of a Black Feminist Otherwise.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 1 (2018): 25-52.
Recommended: Christina Sharpe, "The Wake" from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Lecture Slides HERE

Day Seventeen - Which Reforms Are Abolitionist and Which Reforms Are Not?

Liat Ben-Moshe, "The Tension Between Abolition and Reform"
"How To End Mass Incarceration"
"What Abolitionists Do"
"A Word on Words"
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What is a reform that moves us towards prison abolition? What is a reform that moves us further away from prison abolition? What do you see as the merits, limitations, and (value-neutral) risks of an abolitionist political agenda?
Critical Resistance's Abolition Toolkit - Skip to pg. 49-50 for The Six Steps of Abolition
Recommended: Chris Chapman, Allison C. Carey, and Liat Ben-Moshe, eds., Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Recommended: Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, and Queer (In)Justice, “Queering Prison Abolition, Now?” American Quarterly 64,1 (2012): 115–27.
Recommended: Esther Kaplan, “Organizing Inside,” Poz Magazine, November 1, 1998.

VIDEO: What is Restorative Justice?
VIDEO: What is Accountability?
VIDEO: What is Self-Accountability?
VIDEO: Self-Accountability and Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence
VIDEO: People Who Do Harm Are Not Monsters

Day Eighteen - #AbolishICE and Police Abolition

Rania Unzueta, Maru Mora Willalpando, and Angélica Cházaro, “We Fell in Love in a Hopeless Place: A Grassroots History from #Not1More to Abolish ICE,” Medium, June 29, 2018.
Tina Vasquez, "Abolish Ice: Beyond a Slogan".
Maya Dukmasova, "Abolish the Police?".
Findings Letter from Investigation of Seattle Police Department by the Department of Justice (Dec 16, 2011) - Skim the Executive Summary
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: How do police abolition and ICE abolition relate to the project of prison abolition? How do their visions and concrete policy objectives measure up using the rubric of reformist and non-reformist reforms?
Recommended: Ananya Roy, "The city in the age of Trumpism: From sanctuary to abolition"
Recommended: Jose Martine, "6 Ideas for a Cop Free World".
Recommended: The History of Policing Timeline - Overview, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Recommended: David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide. (Verso, 2018).
Recommended: Dean Spade, "Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer"
Recommended: Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, “Penal Boundaries: Banishment and the Expansion of Punishment,” Law & Social Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2010): 1–38.

I was absent for this day, so I created several activities HERE that you might adapt for your own needs.

Day Nineteen - Youth Incarceration and #NoNewYouthJail

Jackie Wang, "Biopower and Juvenile Deliquency" in Carceral Capitalism
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What is the “juvenile” as a social and legal category? How has this category been used in relations of criminalization, punishment, and social order? What does Wang mean when she defines these relations as "biopolitical"?
Washington Incarceration Stops Here, “Why Oppose the New Youth Jail?”
- Questions to Guide Your Reading: What is WISH’s argument against the new King County Youth Detention Center? How does this argument relate to arguments on prison abolition and reform we have read?
Recommended: Anthony J. Nocella II, Priya Parmar, and David Stovall, eds., From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2014). - Chapter one: Nancy A. Heitzeg: Criminalizing Education: Zero Tolerance Policies, Police in the Hallways, and the School to Prison Pipeline
Recommended: "Against Reform" in Nell Bernstein, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. (The New Press, 2016).
Recommended: Wesley Ware, “’Rounding Up the Homosexuals’: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth”

Lecture Slides HERE (These slides are theory-heavy, FYI.)

Day Twenty - The Future of Prison Abolition

FINAL TAKEAWAYS

Law may be based in formally in philosophy, but it is also a social relation and process. - Beccaria, Dayan
Power is not a “thing” but there are many kinds of power relations. - Foucault
Power relations reify processes into things. The prison is not a thing but a set of social relations and processes. - Foucault, Davis, Gilmore, Story, etc
Power relations make natural what is actually socially produced. No person just is an individual. No people just are a population. - Foucault, Alford, Muhammad, etc
Where we get our theory matters. - Davis, Hernandez
Crime and punishment in the US have never not been tied to relations of settler colonialism, slavery, White supremacy, capitalism, labor, gender, patriarchy, dis/ability (e.g., reason), sexuality and kin-making. - Davis, Hernandez, 13th, LeFlouria, Muhammad
Crime and punishment are historical constructions, though their effects are no less real for being produced. They reflect the views of the time (e.g., who is human, who has a soul, what pays their debt, etc). - Davis, Hernandez, etc
Histories of incarceration are multi-scalar (i.e., national, transnational, regional, local). - Muhammad
Exceptionalism (e.g., “the South is the worst”) and binaries (e.g., “prisons are good or bad, better or worse) stifle our ability to think. - Muhamma, Murakawa
Focusing too much on oppression obscures people’s humanity and agency. - Chase, Law, Mead
Crime and punishment are tied to the kind of economy we build. - Gilmore, Wang
Prisons is not the only socially-organized way to respond to harm. - Davis
Abolition is about more than just prison buildings. - Davis, Ben-Moshe
Abolition requires organizations, collectives, and solidarity. - Gilmore
Reform and abolition exist on a spectrum. - Ben-Moshe
Radical rhetoric is not the same as radical outcomes. - Vasquez
Skepticism and generous curiosity are not the same as cynicism. Hope is not the same as optimism.