Abstract
According to the World Prison Brief (2021), the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with an incarceration rate of 639 per 100,000 people. In 2021, there were over 2 million people incarcerated in prisons and jails across the United States. The extremely high rate of incarceration is often attributed to several structural factors including mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the war on drugs, and the privatization of prisons, which has created a profit incentive for keeping people behind bars. Additionally, racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system have contributed to the overrepresentation of Black and Brown people, as well as low-income individuals, in the prison population. Among those affected are justice-impacted students—formerly incarcerated individuals, students whose family members are incarcerated, and incarcerated individuals seeking postsecondary educational opportunities. In this special issue of About Campus, contributors highlight the critical role postsecondary institutions can play in the lives of people impacted by the criminal justice system, as well as provide insight regarding how surveillance, punishment, and containment can characterize postsecondary institutions as carceral campuses. A carceral campus is a term used to describe a college or university that adopts security and disciplinary measures commonly found in prisons and other carceral institutions.
Carceral campuses have come under scrutiny for contributing to the “school–prison nexus in higher education” (Gardner, Wilson & Bigelow, 2023), where students, particularly students of color and low-income students, are disproportionately disciplined and subject to violent encounters with the criminal justice system. In a political climate where we have seen students and faculty participating in mass social movements challenging anti-Black extrajudicial killings, anti-Asian violence, immigrant exclusion, and Indigenous erasure and land desecration, we have also witnessed postsecondary institutions punitively respond. Carcerality in contemporary higher education is exemplified by the growing presence of technologically advanced campus police stations, the collection of student biometric data, and active shooter emergency protocols that ask students to surveil their peers. It can include policies and practices such as police oversight of campus rallies, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and strict disciplinary codes that are enforced by armed security personnel. The presence of carceral practices on college and university campuses can create an environment of fear and intimidation, which can hinder students’ ability to learn and succeed.
Advocates for a meaningfully rehabilitative and restorative approach to justice argue that colleges and universities should move away from carceral practices and focus on addressing the root causes that make students susceptible to policing, such as poverty, trauma, and lack of access to mental health services. This can involve investing in resources such as counseling and mental health services, restorative justice programs, and community outreach initiatives to support students in need. Simultaneously, the phenomenon of prison education initiatives as a mechanism for reducing recidivism for people with incarceration histories necessitates closer consideration in addressing issues of social inequities.
In this special issue of About Campus, contributors discuss a wide range of responses and approaches to addressing the needs of justice-impacted and incarcerated community members across the United States. Although the best practices and critiques made in each paper differ, they all share a common belief that a world without oppression, violence, and punishment is possible and that we should work toward creating systems that prioritize the well-being and safety of all people, rather than rely on punishment and incarceration. As part of these efforts, higher education can play a crucial part in supporting justice-impacted students in several ways.
Higher education-in-prison initiatives have increasingly become popular for their ability to reduce recidivism. However, Rachel Abouras examines how a “redemption narrative” that sometimes surrounds higher education-in-prison work can reinforce the idea that incarceration can be a positive, constructive experience and by that same token, prison in and of itself is misconstrued as a positive, constructive environment. In “Carceral State University: On College-in-Prison and its Role Within the Larger U.S. Prison System,” Abouras asks us to critically consider how college-in-prison programs are not benign or benevolent interventions. For this reason, is it critical that we consider the ethical challenges that individuals engaging in such work will come up against.
Further questioning the redemption narrative of higher education-in-prison, in “Xenophobia in Prison Higher Education: Towards Recruiting and Supporting Undocumented People in Prison,” Erin Castro, Cindy Fierros, and Edgar Montero detail the reinstatement of Pell eligibility for incarcerated adults in 2023, noting that it is unclear (and unlikely) that justice-impacted undocumented students will be eligible for these scholarships. However, some innovative actions have been taken, including a case in Utah where a partnership between the University of Utah Prison Education Program and the Consuldado de México attempts to extend educational opportunities to incarcerated undocumented individuals who are Mexican nationals.
While popular discourse depicts the relationship between formal carceral institutions and postsecondary sites as limited to in-prison educational opportunities, in “The Practice of the Commons and the Ethics of Sharing: Aspiring Towards Abolitionist Pedagogy Through Faculty Collaboration,” Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, Aiko Yoshino, Carina Gallo, Autumn Thoyre, and Paige Viren bring attention to the subtle ways carcerality plays out in higher education, including well-accepted teaching practices that normalize working in isolation and punitive pedagogical approaches. They offer the importance of faculty collaboration and colearning as crucial to work against structural educational inequities in colleges and universities and radically reimagining pedagogy through abolitionist practices.
Abolitionist aspirations are further explored in “Radically Rethinking Equity in Higher Education: Lessons from Project Rebound.” Martha Escobar, Melissa Barragan, Lily Gonzalez, and Priscilla Terriquez show how Project Rebound—a program that supports the postsecondary pursuit of formerly incarcerated individuals in the California State University system—works as an alternative to mass incarceration, a strategy for expanding access and opportunities to a marginalized population, and a tool to challenge carcerality within higher education. Through an in-depth reflection of their advocacy, the authors portray the life-affirming college access and retention work that women-of-color scholar-practitioners conduct alongside formerly incarcerated students, and illuminate both the limitations and possibilities of postsecondary institutions to serve these students.
Collectively, the issues that the contributors grapple with point to the tenuous reality that there exists a school–prison nexus in higher education that scholars and practitioners must contend with in our quest to create diverse, equitable, and inclusive postsecondary opportunities.