The latest issue of Radical Teacher is devoted to teaching about prison abolition and it is excellent. I have been thinking a lot about teaching lately since I have now returned to the classroom this fall after a 5 year hiatus. I had been feeling burnt out with respect to teaching college students. I am stepping back in now feeling much more energized and excited.

In the introduction to Radical Teacher, the editors offer this window about their discussions in putting the issue together:

The conversations we had during meetings of the Editorial Board of Radical Teacher mirrored the debates on the left about how best to resist the PIC. Many members of the Board felt that the contemporary PIC abolition movement was utopian in the pejorative sense — a pie-in-the-sky faction ungrounded in the socio-political possibilities of this historical juncture. Others expressed the commonly held fear that prisons, though overly relied upon in the United States, are necessary institutions to house those members of society who have caused certain kinds of harm, such as murderers, rapists, and perpetrators of hate crimes. While those of us on the left might imagine ourselves to be less inclined to be persuaded by arguments for the necessity of prisons based on the racialized “threat” of the “criminal,” we sometimes have a hard time knowing where else to turn to address violence against queer people, people of color, immigrants, and others.

The honesty in this paragraph is wonderful. It is of course true that even those of us who consider ourselves to be progressive on a number of social issues still find ourselves struggling with internalized oppression. This is an inescapable fact of life. The important thing is to notice this and to struggle to overcome it.

Two friends of mine, Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica Meiners, also have a terrific essay in this issue. They wrote a piece titled “Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition through the Good the Bad and the Innocent.” The essay opens with two examples from the authors. I will include Jessi’s example here:

It is the 8th week of English class in our adult high school completion program, and we have just read a short excerpt from Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? As a class, we review vocabulary words, and then, piece by piece, work to understand Davis’s argument for prison abolition. All of the students have firsthand experience of the system, and they agree that the prison system is clearly racist in its impact. But when we get to the point of discussing abolition — of shutting down prisons — the class quiets. The disagreements start. “I agree with abolishing the death penalty, but…” “But some people need to get locked up.” “I agree we need to change the system, but getting rid of prisons entirely,,,” “It’s too much…” “I don’t think we need to go that far…”

I find myself in the awkward position of being the only person without direct experience of being locked up, and the only vocal abolitionist. By the end of our conversation, I perceive that students have made up their minds and are united in their analysis: the prison system is messed up, but abolition is “going too far.” I wonder to myself what went wrong in our conversation. Why was I not able to present abolition in a way that challenged people to go further or question their assumptions about the necessity of prisons?

Jessi and Erica are both long-time anti-prison activists and educators. They bravely lay out their challenges in teaching abolition to students with experience in the criminal legal system. The examples that they offer are excellent because so many of us who teach about prisons and abolition have encountered similar resistance.

They offer this important insight in the essay:

We believe it is key to not rest with the what about the bad people questions or to ignore the feelings produced through and by the PIC, but to explore these fears by responding to the “bad” people statements with the question: “What would we do about violence without prisons?” We believe this is an important question, one that needs to be asked in multiple contexts. What are we doing about violence, both interpersonal and state-sanctioned? What are we doing to confront and defuse racist fears? This reframing renders visible how the original question, “what about the bad people?” masks the reality that prison offers a false answer to the question of violence, actually shifts resources and energy from meaningful and sustainable anti-violence work. Abolition frameworks point out that anti-violence work needs to be centered, not around identifying and caging bad people, but in responding to and preventing violence.

I think that this is a key reframing that provides a real opportunity to engage more people in discussions about abolition. Read the entire issue, you won’t be sorry. Over the next few days, I will be highlighting other selections from the issue.