About
The Prison, later renamed to Prison Abolition Big Ideas Course, introduces students to the long history of the prison in the American experience, and does so by engaging ideas, movements, and practices to craft worlds of care and mutuality beyond the harms that the prison produces and legitimates. Students engage a range of literatures through which to reorganize the logics of an institution commonly accepted as the reasonable destination for those identified as “criminal.” Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, the course engages with the full range of “carceral geographies” in which social life is penetrated with the state’s power to surveil, arrest, judge, and punish its citizens; as well as the “abolition geographies” that, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms, combine resources, creativity, and commitment to create freedom as a place where all life/lives are precious.
The pilot course, which enrolled 300 students, was an innovative development in the AC curriculum and was designed to allow for both enrolled students and the faculty teaching the course to learn more from one another. This is also the first 'Big Ideas' course to involve local Bay Area community organizations in the student learning activities, as well as a host of artists and social media practitioners in the design of research-based internships.
Common to the instructors' disciplinary frameworks is the recognition that racial identity and the carceral state have been co-determinate in the Americas and in the United States in particular from the beginning of European settlement to the present. Whether setting the boundary between people bound to perpetual slavery and those who could earn and bequeath freedom, or between the employable and the unemployable today, the carceral state is inextricably bound up with our ways of knowing and acting on Americans through racializing them.
The trajectory of the class traces the idea of prison through its complex historical development, engaging the social, legal, and narrative parameters of incarceration, and leading to a real-time engagement with the current politics of mass incarceration in California and nationally (with some comparison to global alternatives). The course also presents people’s racialized and minoritized lived experiences with the carceral system and its intersections with other systems of state control, including criminal supervision, child welfare, and the welfare state. The semester is punctuated with periodic presentations from invited activists, formerly incarcerated citizens, authors, and artists. These sessions extend the course's conversation and debate beyond the walls of academia. Guests, instructors, and students participate together in these discussions of some of the most exciting and contentious questions that arise from our contemporary cultural landscape.