Pedagogical Disruptions of Dominant Narratives in Criminology: The Power of an Inside-Out Classroom

• In Event: Teaching Criminology Beyond the Classroom: Working with Prisons, Police, and Case Studies

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the pedagogical and transformative impact of transporting the university classroom into carceral settings. We begin by exposing the ways that dominant criminological narratives indoctrinate students into dangerously racialized, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist affiliations that are antagonistic to communities of color. The criminalizing pedagogies provided in traditional criminal justice departments are backed by White supremacist, hetero-patriarchal institutions of power that arm and provide impunity to the very system students aim to work within, thus laying the groundwork for the criminal justice system to extend the violence of its predecessor institutions of enslavement and colonial occupation. Having identified these problems, we illustrate how the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, as a pedagogical model and practice that centers sites of imprisonment and experiences of unfreedom, provides one way to disrupt dominant criminal justice narratives. Using examples from our own experiences teaching Crime and Justice Studies courses in carceral facilities, we show how liberatory pedagogical methods can break down the barriers that segregate criminalized and imprisoned communities from sanctioned locations of teaching and knowledge production. The prison classroom allows students to see and experience rewritten narratives of liberation in ways that are literal and first hand, rather than figurative and abstract.

Authors

• Tammi Arford, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

• Susan Krumholz, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

• Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth