WILL MCKEITHEN
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?
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Prison Policy Initiative, "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018"
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Recommended: Angela Davis interview with Democracy Now
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Recommended: Explore data provided by the Prison Policy Initiative and Bureau of Justice Statistics
Day Two - What is Crime? What is Punishment? What is "The Criminal"?
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Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments - Read Chapters 1-6 and 12
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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?
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Colin Dayan, “Civil Death” from The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons
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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?
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VIDEO: Felony Disenfranchisement
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Recommended: Caleb Smith, "Civil Death and Carceral Life" from The Prison and the American Imagination
Day Three - The Prison as Disciplinary, Pt. 1
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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".
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Recommended: Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon and Other Prison Writings (Verso, 1995).
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Recommended: Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History trans. Jonathan Kneight (New York: New Press, The, 2003), Introduction; 5–22; 50–69; 70–84.
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Recommended: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Part One "Torture" and Part Two "Punishment"
Day Four - The Prison as Disciplinary, Pt. 2
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Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Read Part Four "Prison" - Focus on "The Carceral."
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Recommended: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Part One "Torture" and Part Two "Punishment"
Day Five - The Prison and Racist State Violence, aka Foucault Was Wrong!!
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Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment & Prison Abolition”
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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?
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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?
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UNIT 2 - The History of US Mass Incarceration and Anti-Prison Rebellion
Day Six - Settler Colonialism, Racial Capitalism, and the Origins of Prison
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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?
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Day Seven - The Origins of Immigration "Detention"
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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?
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Recommended: Chapters 4 and 6 in City of Inmates
Day Eight - The Deep Roots of Mass Incarceration
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13th, directed by Ava DuVernay (Kandoo Films, 2016)
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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!
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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?
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VIDEO: The Adult-ification (and Criminalization) of Black Girls
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Recommended: Library of Congress, “Convict Lease System.”
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Recommended: Slavery by Another Name, directed by Sam Pollard (PBS, 2012)
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Recommended: “Slavery by Another Name,” website.
Day Nine - A History of Criminalizing Blackness
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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?
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Day Ten - Mid-20th C. Crime and Punishment, aka Liberals Will Not Save Us!!
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Naomi Murakawa, First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America - Chapters 1 and 3
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Questions to Guide Your Reading: How have liberals in US history conceptualized race, racism, and/or racial justice? Justice versus administration?
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Recommended: Naomi Murakawa, First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America - Chapters 2 and 4
Day Eleven - Prisoner Resistance
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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?
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Recommended: Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford University Press, 1994).
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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!!
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"Crisis and Surplus” in "Golden Gulag" by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. p. 55-57
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Extra: Mini Video Lecture by Will on Crisis and Surplus (Unfortunately, I have only figured out how to share access with UW-affiliated folks.)
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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?
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Recommended: Gilmore, R.W., Golden Gulag.
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Recommended: Prison Town Comix by The Real Cost of Prisons Project
Day Thirteen - More Political Economy of Prisons
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Recommended: Angela Davis, "The Prison Industrial Complex" in Are Prisons Obsolete?
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VIDEO: The Recent US Supreme Court Decision on High Fines and Civil Asset Forfeiture (VERY relevant to reading!)
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Recommended: Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland
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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!!
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Brett Story, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (Grasshopper Films, 2017).
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Recommended: Knotted Line, website
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Recommended: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes "Learn More" Webpage
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Recommended: "Forum: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes"
UNIT 3 - Prison Reform and Abolition
Day Fifteen - What is Prison Abolition?
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Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? - Chapters 1, 3, and 6
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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?”
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VIDEO: Dean Spade and Reina Gossett Four Part Series (Really accessible!)
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VIDEO: Dean Spade and Reina Gossett Follow-up (Again, really accessible!)
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Recommended: "Think prison abolition in America is impossible? It once felt inevitable"
Day Sixteen - Resisting the Innocence/Guilt Binary
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Jackie Wang, "Against Innocence" in Carceral Capitalism
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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?
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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?
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Recommended: Christina Sharpe, "The Wake" from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Day Seventeen - Which Reforms Are Abolitionist and Which Reforms Are Not?
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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?
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Critical Resistance's Abolition Toolkit - Skip to pg. 49-50 for The Six Steps of Abolition
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Recommended: Esther Kaplan, “Organizing Inside,” Poz Magazine, November 1, 1998.
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VIDEO: What is Restorative Justice?
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VIDEO: What is Accountability?
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VIDEO: What is Self-Accountability?
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VIDEO: Self-Accountability and Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence
Day Eighteen - #AbolishICE and Police Abolition
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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?
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Recommended: Ananya Roy, "The city in the age of Trumpism: From sanctuary to abolition"
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Recommended: Jose Martine, "6 Ideas for a Cop Free World".
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Recommended: The History of Policing Timeline - Overview, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
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Recommended: David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide. (Verso, 2018).
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Recommended: Dean Spade, "Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer"
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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
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Jackie Wang, "Biopower and Juvenile Deliquency" in Carceral Capitalism
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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"?
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Washington Incarceration Stops Here, “Why Oppose the New Youth Jail?”
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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?
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Recommended: "Against Reform" in Nell Bernstein, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. (The New Press, 2016).
Day Twenty - The Future of Prison Abolition
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“The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A conversation between Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez”
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James Kilgore, "The First Step Act Opens the Door to Digital Incarceration"
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VIDEO: The First Step Act
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Recommended: Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered
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Recommended: Why is a Florida for-profit prison company backing bipartisan criminal justice reform?
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Recommended: "Fighting Mass Incarceration Under Trump" by James Kilgore
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Recommended: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on "The Economy of Incarceration"
FINAL TAKEAWAYS
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Law may be based in formally in philosophy, but it is also a social relation and process. - Beccaria, Dayan
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Power is not a “thing” but there are many kinds of power relations. - Foucault
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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
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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
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Where we get our theory matters. - Davis, Hernandez
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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
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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
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Histories of incarceration are multi-scalar (i.e., national, transnational, regional, local). - Muhammad
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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
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Focusing too much on oppression obscures people’s humanity and agency. - Chase, Law, Mead
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Crime and punishment are tied to the kind of economy we build. - Gilmore, Wang
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Prisons is not the only socially-organized way to respond to harm. - Davis
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Abolition is about more than just prison buildings. - Davis, Ben-Moshe
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Abolition requires organizations, collectives, and solidarity. - Gilmore
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Reform and abolition exist on a spectrum. - Ben-Moshe
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Radical rhetoric is not the same as radical outcomes. - Vasquez
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Skepticism and generous curiosity are not the same as cynicism. Hope is not the same as optimism.