Sneaking it in: Teaching Prison Abolition in Prison and University Classrooms

• In Event: Penal Abolition: Session 1 of 2

Abstract

In Canada the recently released report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has made several recommendations to decolonize higher education and to remedy the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples. At the same time the university sector must meet benchmarks for experiential learning to make students ‘job ready’. It is in this context that I have attempted to introduce pedagogy of prison abolition with undergraduate students. In this paper I consider how decolonization and prison abolition can be linked in pedagogy. This paper reflects on my role as an instructor in a prison-based university course – specifically some of the unique challenges of introducing university administrators, university students, and incarcerated students to abolition as a decolonizing praxis. I reflect on pedagogical strategies that expose how incarcerated students and university students often share similar neo-liberal values of punishment and the ‘criminalized other’: who deserves justice and who does not. Similarities between imprisoned students and students in the community are recognized through their shared institutional lives of responsibilization: the remaking of themselves into the good citizen; and the university and the correctional facility as each a part of a neoliberal project.

Author

• Gillian Balfour, Trent University