Dear Higher Education In Prison: Letters to an Abolitionist Feminist future for higher education in prison

• In Event: World-making in the Carceral Classroom: Centering Abolition Feminism as an Analytic Lens

Abstract

Objective: Women of Color are increasingly targeted for incarceration while having limited access to education leading up to, during, and after incarceration (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2022; Ernst, 2023; Glover v. Johnson, 1979; Ritchie, 2017). Research indicates the educational trajectories of Women of Color With Incarceration History can have a host of positive impacts on their lives and communities, but little is aimed at ensuring they are reaping these benefits (Allen, 2023; Carter et al., 2016). I use Black Feminist Dialogues and Epistolary Methods (Collins, 2000; Melonas, 2021) to explore how Women of Color With Incarceration History experience Higher Education in Prison (HEP) and their desires for its future.

Theoretical Framework: In accordance with our abolitionist feminist framework, I conduct analysis meant to trouble: 1) the ways education and incarceration operate as systems of gendered violence that meet at the carceral classroom and 2) how Women of Color’s experiences in HEP can rupture that status quo. I use desire-based frameworks (Lorde, 1978; Tuck, 2009) for engaging postsecondary world-making with the desires of Women of Color With Incarceration History at the helm.

Methods & Data: I engage Women of Color With Incarceration History in one-on-one Dialogues, and prompted letter-writing addressed to higher education about their experiences and desires for its future. I theorize Epistolary Refusal and Daughter/ed Coding (Evans-Winters, 2019; Simpson, 2014; Sharpe, 2016) as analytic methodologies informed by my desire for research praxis that do not contribute to “data of dispossession" (McKittrick, 2021 p. 49).

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance: Early findings indicate that a postsecondary future rooted in participants’ desires must be built through the “both/and” heuristic that abolitionist feminism uplifts. For example, participants cited HEP as inaccessible if they owed the affiliated institution money, but that they were told by peers or staff they trust to “just come” to courses being taught despite not receiving credit.

Here, two gendered systems (i.e. incarceration, education) are “both” expanding/narrowing academic access, “and” this troubles how educational praxis in carceral settings might be better aimed at abolition by cultivating its own obsolescence than conferring credit. In essence, the desires Women of Color with Incarceration History have for HEP allude to: 1) the ways that universities/colleges are already functioning as obsolete when not conferring credit, and 2) how desire in the carceral classroom itself represents an abolitionist rupture by not rendering the institution of higher education with absolute power over knowledge building/exchange.

Desiring our own obsolescence
Working toward obsolescence in HEP means understanding that we, as educators, represent both a site of gendered violence and healing, and that healing is often made possible by a relational ecology (i.e. trusting the “just come”) that we did not necessarily seed ourselves. In research, this means attuning our analysis to the ways that desires enacted by systems-impacted in education-carceral contexts that render institutional involvement obsolete exemplify already existing world-making where the carceral-educational allegiance that HEP operates through is, in fact, obsolete.

Author

• Cydney Y. Caradonna, University of Utah