The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position

Dylan Rodríguez

Radical Teacher, Number 88, Summer 2010, pp. 7-19 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press DOI: 10.1353/rdt.2010.0006

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rdt/summary/v088/88.rodriguez.html

Access Provided by Scarsdale High School at 01/04/13 12:32AM GMT The Disorientation the prison, along with the relations of power and normalized state violence that of the Teaching the prison inhabits/produces, form the everyday condition of possibility for the Act: Abolition as teaching act; and 2) to engage a histori- cally situated abolitionist praxis that is, in Pedagogical Position this moment, primarily pedagogical. A working conception of the “prison regime” offers a useful tool of critical social By Dylan Rodríguez analysis as well as a theoretical framework for contextualizing critical, radical, and Prison Regime/the Disorientation of perhaps abolitionist pedagogies. In subtle distinction from the criminological, social the Teaching Act scientific, and common sense under- he global U.S. prison regime has no standings of “criminal justice,” “prisons/ precedent or peer and has become jails,” and the “correctional system,” the a Tprimary condition of schooling, educa- notion of a prison regime focuses on three tion, and pedagogy in every possible site. interrelated technologies and processes that Aside from its sheer accumulation of are dynamically produced at the site of captive bodies (more than 2.5 million, imprisonment: first, the prison regime if one includes children, military cap- encompasses the material arrangements tives, undocumented migrants, and the of institutional power that create infor- mentally ill/disordered),1 the prison has mal (and often nominally illegal) routines become central to the (re)production and and protocols of militarized physiological (re)invention of a robust and historically domination over human beings held cap- dynamic white supremacist state: at its tive by the state. This domination privi- farthest institutional reaches, the prison leges a historical anti-black state violence has developed a capacity to organize and that is particularly traceable to the latter disrupt the most taken-for-granted fea- stages of continental racial chattel slavery tures of everyday social life, including and its immediate epochal aftermath in “family,” “community,” “school,” and indi- “post-emancipation” white supremacy and vidual social identities. Students, teach- juridical racial segregation/apartheid—a ers, and administrators of all kinds have privileging that is directly reflected in come to conceptualize “freedom,” “safety,” the actual demography of the imprisoned and “peace” as a relatively direct outcome population, composed of a Black majority. of state-conducted domestic war (wars The institutional elaborations of this white on crime, drugs, gangs, immigrants, ter- supremacist and anti-black carceral state ror, etc.), legitimated police violence, and create an overarching system of physi- large-scale, punitive imprisonment. ological domination that subsumes differ- In what follows, I attempt to offer the ently racialized subjects (including whites) outlines of a critical analysis and sche- into institutional routines (strip search- matic social theory that might be useful to ing and regular bodily invasion, legally two overlapping, urgent tasks of the radi- sanctioned torture, ad hoc assassination, cal teacher: 1) to better understand how routinized medical neglect) that revise

NUMBER 88 • RADICAL TEACHER 7 while sustaining the everyday practices condition of “teaching” in the context of of genocidal racial slavery. While there a prison regime that is so relentless in its are multiple variations on this regime innovation and intrusiveness? of physiological dominance—including We might depart from another critical (Latino/a, Muslim, and Arab) immigrant premise: that the prison4 (jail, detention detention, extra-territorial military pris- center, etc.) cannot be conceptualized as ons, and asylums—it is crucial to recog- a place that is wholly separate or alien- nize that the genealogy of the prison’s ated from the normalized intercourses of systemic violence is anchored in the nor- civil society or “the free world.” Speaking malized Black genocide of U.S. and New more precisely to the concerns raised by World nation-building.2 this issue of Radical Teacher, the mas- Second, the concept of the prison regime sive carceral-cultural form of the prison understands the place of state-ordained has naturalized a systemic disorientation human capture as a modality of social of the teaching act, so that teaching is no (dis)organization that produces numerous longer separable from the work of polic- forms of interpersonal and systemic (race, ing, juridical discipline, and state-crafted class, gender, sexual) violence within and punishment. beyond the physical sites of imprison- Thus, I do not think the crucial - ques ment. Here, the multiple and vast social tion in our historical moment is whether effects of imprisonment (from affective or not our teaching ultimately supports disruptions of community and extended or adequately challenges the material familial ties to long-term economic/geo- arrangements and cultural significations graphic displacement) are understood as of the prison regime—just as I believe fundamental and systemic dimensions of the central question under the rule of the policing and imprisonment apparatus, apartheid is not whether a curriculum rather than secondary or unintended con- condones or opposes the spatial arrange- sequences of it.3 ments of white supremacy and intensified Third, the prison regime encompass- racist state violence. Rather, the primary es the multiple knowledges and meanings question is whether and how the act that are created around the institutional of teaching can effectively and radically site and cultural symbol of “the prison,” displace the normalized misery, everyday including those that circulate in popular suffering, and mundane state violence that culture and among the administrative are reproduced and/or passively condoned bureaucracies and curriculum of schools. by both hegemonic and critical/counter- Given this conception of the prison hegemonic pedagogies. regime as a far-reaching and invasive I am arguing that our historical con- arrangement of social power, state vio- ditions urgently dictate that a strategic lence, and human domination, we might distinction must be drawn between lib- better be able to understand the signifi- eral, social justice, critical, and even “radi- cance of everyday routines of school-based cal” pedagogies that are capable of even discipline that imply the possibility of remotely justifying, defending, or tolerating imprisonment as the punitive bureau- a proto-genocidal prison regime that is cratic outcome of misbehavior, truancy, without precedent or peer, on the one and academic failure. What, then, is the hand, and those attempts at abolitionist

8 RADICAL TEACHER • NUMBER 88 pedagogy that—in an urgent embracing ing prep schools for prison.”11 These puni- of the historical necessity of innovation, tive iterations of an increasingly carceral improvisation, and radical rearticulation— schooling industrial complex, however, are attempting to generate new epistemic represent a symptomatic reflection of how and intellectual approaches to meaning, the racist state—and white supremacist knowledge, learning, and practice for the social formation generally—are produc- sake of life, liberation, and new social pos- ing new categories of social identities sibilities. I am concerned with addressing (and redefining older ones) that can only a pedagogical tendency that artificially be “taught” within a direct relationship to the separates the teacher-student relation and regulatory mechanisms and imminent (state) “the school” from “the prison.” violence of the prison industrial complex and Such strategic distinctions are useful for the U.S. prison regime. (Even while some delineating the ways that multiple peda- are relatively privileged by the institu- gogical epistemes5 (including otherwise tional logics of relative de-criminaliza- critical and radical ones) operate from the tion, their bodily mobility and academic a priori notion that prisons and policing progression are contingent on the state’s serve necessary, peace-and-safety mak- capacity to separate and “protect” them ing, and “good” social functions that are from the criminalized.) somehow separable or recuperable from There are, at first, categories of social their historical primacy to socioeconom- subjects that are apprehended and natural- ic/class repression, American apartheid,6 ized by the school-as-state—gifted and racial slavery,7 indigenous land displace- talented, undocumented, gang affiliated, ment and cultural genocide,8 and white exceptional, at-risk, average—who are supremacist colonization.9 In other words, then, by ontological necessity, hierar- what might happen to the disoriented chically separated through the protocols teaching act if it sere re-oriented against of pseudo-standardized intelligence quo- the assumptive necessity, integrity, and tient, socioeconomic class, race, gender, taken-for-grantedness of prisons, polic- citizenship, sexuality, neighborhood ing, and the normalized state violence geography, etc. This seemingly compul- they reproduce? sory, school-sited reproduction of the deadly circuits of privilege and alienation Schooling Regime is anything but new, and has always been The structural symbiosis between schools central to the routines of the U.S. school- and the racist policing/prison state is evi- ing regime, particularly in its colonialist 12 dent in the administrative, public policy, and post-emancipationist articulations. and pedagogical innovations of the War The idea of the U.S. prison apparatus as on Drugs, “Zero Tolerance,” “No Child a regime, in this context, brings attention Left Behind,” and the school-based mili- to how prisons are not places outside and tarizations of the “school to prison (and apart from our everyday lives, but instead military) pipeline.”10 Angela Y. Davis shape and deform our identities, communi- has suggested that “when children attend ties, and modes of social interaction. schools that place a greater value on disci- I have written elsewhere that the prison pline and security than on knowledge and regime is an apparatus of power/violence intellectual development, they are attend- that cannot be reduced to a minor “insti- NUMBER 88 • RADICAL TEACHER 9 tution” of the state, but has in fact become construction companies, and uniform an apparatus that possesses and constitutes manufacturers) and government/state the state, often as if autonomous of its apparatuses (including police, corrections, authority.13 Here, I am interested in how and elected officials) in projects of - mul this regime overlaps with and mutu- tiply-scaled human immobilization and ally nourishes the multiple “schooling imprisonment. The national abolitionist regimes” that make up the U.S. educa- organization Critical Resistance elabo- tional system. The U.S. prison, in other rates that the prison industrial complex words, has become a model and prototype is a “system situated at the intersection of for power relations more generally, in which governmental and private interests that 1) institutional authority is intertwined uses prisons as a solution to social, politi- with the policing and surveillance capaci- cal, and economic problems.”14 In fact, as ties (legitimated violence) of the state, 2) many abolitionist scholars have noted, the the broadly cultural and peculiarly juridi- rise of the prison industrial complex is in cal racial/gender criminalization of par- part a direct outcome of the liberal-pro- ticular social subjects becomes a primary gressive “prison reform” successes of the framework for organizing institutional 1970s. The political convergence between access, and 3) the practice of systemic liberals, progressives, and “law and order” bodily immobilization (incarceration) conservatives/reactionaries, located within permeates the normal routines of the the accelerating political and geographical “free world.” To trace the movements of displacements of globalization,15 gener- the prison’s modeling of power relations ated a host of material transformations to the site of the school is to understand and institutional shifts that facilitated— that policing/surveillance, criminaliza- in fact, necessitated—the large-scale reor- tion, and immobilization are as much ganization of the prison into a host of new schooling practices as they are imprison- and/or qualitatively intensified structural ment practices. The teacher is generally relationships with numerous political and being asked to train the foot soldiers, economic apparatuses, including public middle managers, administrators, work- policy and legislative bodies, electoral ers, intellectuals, and potential captives of and lobbying apparatuses, the medical the school/prison confluence, whether the and architectural/construction industries, classroom is populated by criminalized and various other hegemonic institutional Black and Brown youth or white Ph.D. forms. candidates. Two thoughts are worth con- Concretely, the reform of the prison sidering: the teaching act is constituted by required its own expansion and bureau- the technologies of the prison regime, and cratic multiplication: for example, the the school is inseparable from the prison reform of prison overcrowding came to industrial complex. involve an astronomical growth in new The “prison industrial complex,” in con- prison construction (rather than decar- trast to the prison regime, names the ceration and release), the reformist out- emergence over the last three decades rage against preventable deaths and severe of multiple symbiotic institutional rela- physiological suffering from (communi- tionships that dynamically link private cable, congenital, and mental) illnesses business (such as architectural firms, yielded the piecemeal incorporation of

10 RADICAL TEACHER • NUMBER 88 medical facilities and staff into prison protocols (as opposed to addressing the fact that mas- sive incarceration inherently creates and circulates sickness), and reformist recognition of carceral state violence against emotionally disordered, mental- ly ill, and disabled captives led to the creation of new prisons and pharmaceutical regimens for the “criminally insane,” and so on. Following the historical trajectory of Angela Y. Davis’ concise state to isolate or extinguish the crimi- and accurate assessment that “during nal/dangerous; and 3) the U.S. nation- the (American) revolutionary period, the building project is endemically decent penitentiary was generally viewed as a or (at least) democratic in spirit, and its progressive reform, linked to the larger apparent corruptions, contradictions, and campaign for the rights of citizens,”16 it systemic brutalities (including and espe- is crucial to recognize that the prison cially the racial, gender, and class-based ” , (2010) “C ivili z ed lavery S industrial complex is one of the most violence of the prison industrial complex) significant “reformist” achievements in are ultimately reformable, redeemable, or U.S. history and is not simply the perverse (if all else fails) forgivable. social project of self-identified reaction- It is virtually indisputable—though aries and conservatives. Its roots and always worth restating—that most peda- T imothy D. C lark -B ey sustenance are fundamentally located in gogical practices (including many “criti- the American liberal-progressive impulse cal/radical” ones) invest in producing or toward reforming institutionalized state edifying “free” and self-governing citi- violence rather than abolishing it. zen/subjects. The assumptive framework The absolute banality of the prison of this pedagogical framework tends to regime’s presence in the administrative conflate civil society with “ freedom,” as if protocols, curricula, and educational rou- one’s physical presence in civil society tines of the school is almost omnipresent: is separable from the actual and immi- aside from the most obvious appearances nent state violence of criminalization and of the racist policing state on campuses policing. (Is a criminalized and policed everywhere, it is generally the funda- person really “free”?). This pedagogical mental epistemological (hence pedagogi- approach also leaves unasked the ques- cal) assumption of the school that 1) tion of whether the central premise of social order (peace) requires a normal- the teaching practice itself—that a given ized, culturally legitimated proliferation pedagogy is actually capable of produc- of state violence (policing, juridical pun- ing free citizen/subjects under such his- ishment, war); 2) the survival of civil soci- torical conditions—might implode if its ety (schools, citizenship, and individual conditions of possibility were adequately “freedom”) depends on the capacity of the confronted. To clarify: as teachers, our

NUMBER 88 • RADICAL TEACHER 11 generic pedagogical assumption is that “free,” self-governing, critical student/ we are either teaching to “free” student- subjects, but instead centers on the struc- citizens who must be empowered and turally violent conditions of possibility for encouraged to live up to the responsibili- “pedagogy” itself, in what form can criti- ties of their nominal freedom (a task that cal, radical, liberationist teaching actually may be interpreted differently and con- occur? To revise a previous question: how tradictorily depending on the teacher), or might the conceptual premises and prac- that our pedagogy intends to participate tical premises of classroom pedagogy be in the creation of free student-citizens who transformed, rethought, and strategically are capable of being trained to participate disrupted in order that an abolitionist re- robustly in civil society, outside and apart orientation of teaching becomes feasible from the social dominance and institu- and effective? tional violence of the prison regime. In both instances, the underlying task of The (Pedagogical) Necessity of the the teacher is to train the student to avert direct confrontation with the policing and Impossible imprisonment apparatus, and to remain A compulsory deferral of abolitionist un-incarcerated and relatively un-crimi- pedagogical possibilities composes the nalized by the state. largely unaddressed precedent of teaching Whether or not the teacher can claim in the current historical period. It is this to succeed in this task, a basic historical deferral—generally unacknowledged and truth is obscured and avoided: the struc- largely presumed—that both undermines tural symbiosis between the schooling the emergence of an abolitionist pedagog- and prison regimes has already rendered ical praxis and illuminates abolitionism’s the prevailing cultural and institutional necessity as a dynamic practice of social rubrics “freedom” an utter sham, no less transformation, over and against liberal than the Declaration of Independence was and progressive appropriations of “critical/ a pronouncement of displacement, liqui- radical pedagogy.” dation, and enslavement for the majority Contrary to the thinly disguised ideo- of the continent’s inhabitants. Within the logical Alinskyism that contemporary schooling regime/prison regime nexus, liberal, progressive, critical, and “radical” many are taught into freedom in order to teaching generally and tacitly assumes in administer, enforce, and passively repro- relation to the prison regime, what is usu- duce the unfreedom of others, while some ally required, and what usually works as a are trained into a tentative and always- strategy for teaching against the carceral temporary avoidance of unfreedom, mea- common sense, is a pedagogical approach gerly rewarded with the accoutrements that asks the unaskable, posits the neces- of civic inclusion (a job, a vote, a home sity of the impossible, and embraces the address). Numerous others are trained to creative danger inherent in liberationist inhabit a space across or in between these futures. About a decade of teaching a fraudulent modalities of freedom. If the variety of courses at the undergraduate radical teacher’s primary challenge does and graduate levels at one of the most not initially revolve around the creation demographically diverse research univer- of pedagogical strategies that can produce sities in the United States (the University

12 RADICAL TEACHER • NUMBER 88 of California, Riverside) has allowed simplistic, way of understanding how the me the opportunity to experiment with prison regime thrives. What we require, the curricular content, assignment form, instead, is a sustained analytical discus- pedagogical mode, and conceptual orga- sion that considers how multiple layers nization of coursework that directly or of knowledge—including common sense tangentially addresses the formation of and its different cultural forms—are con- the U.S. prison regime and prison indus- stantly producing a “lived truth” of policing trial complex. Students are consistently and prisons that has nothing at all to do (and often unanimously) eager to locate with an essential, objective truth. Rather, their studies within an abolitionist gene- this fabricated, lived truth forms the tem- alogy—often understanding their work plate of everyday life through which we as potentially connected to a living his- come to believe that we more or less tory of radical social movements and understand and “know” the prison and epistemological-political revolt—and tend policing apparatus, and which dynamically to embrace the high academic demands produces our consent and/or surrender to its and rigor of these courses with far less epochal oppressive violence. resistance and ambivalence than in many As a pedagogical tool, this framework of my other Ethnic Studies courses. compels students and teachers to examine There are some immediate analytical how deeply engaged they are in the violent and scholarly tools that form a basic common sense of the prison and the racist pedagogical apparatus for productively state. Who is left for dead in the com- exploding the generalized common sense mon discourse of crime, “innocence,” and that creates and surrounds the U.S. prison “guilt”? How has the mundane institution- regime. In fact, it is crucial for teachers alized violence of the racist state become and students to collectively understand so normalized as to be generally beyond that it is precisely the circulation and comment? What has made the prison concrete enactment of this common sense and policing apparatus in its current form that makes it central to the prison regime, appear to be so permanent, necessary, and not simply an ideological “supplement” immovable within the common sense of of it. Put differently, many students and social change and historical transforma- teachers have a tendency to presume that tion? In this sense, teachers and students the cultural symbols and popular dis- can attempt to concretely understand how courses that signify and give common they are a dynamic part of the prison sense meaning to prisons and policing regime’s production and reproduction— are external to the prison regime, as if and thus how they might also be part of these symbols and discourses (produced its abolition through the work of building through mass media, state spokespersons and teaching a radical and liberatory com- and elected officials, right-wing think mon sense (this is political work that any- tanks, video games, television crime dra- one can do, ideally as part of a community mas, etc.) simply amount to “bad” or of social movement). “deceptive” propaganda that conspirato- Additionally, the abolitionist teacher rially hide some essential “truth” about can prioritize a rigorous—and vigorous— prisons that can be uncovered. This is a critique of the endemic complicities of seductive and self-explanatory, but far too liberal/progressive reformism to the

NUMBER 88 • RADICAL TEACHER 13 Finally, the horizon of the possible is only constrained by one’s pedagogical willingness to locate a particular political struggle (here, prison abolition) within the long and living history of liberation movements. In this context, “prison aboli- tion” can be understood as one important strain within a continuously unfurling fabric of liberationist political horizons, in which the imagination of the possible and the practical is shaped but not limited by the specific material and institutional condi-

J amal B iggs , “F ree I nside ” (2009) tions within which one lives. It is useful to continually ask: on whose shoulders transformation, expansion, and ultimate does one sit, when undertaking the auda- reproduction of racist state violence and cious identifications and political prac- (proto)genocide; this entails a radical cri- tices endemic to an abolitionist pedagogy? tique of everything from the sociopolitical There is something profoundly indelible legacies of “civil rights” and the oppressive and emboldening in realizing that one’s capacities of “human rights” to the racist “own” political struggle is deeply con- state’s direct assimilation of 1970s-era nected to a vibrant, robust, creative, and “prison reform” agendas into the blue- beautiful legacy of collective imagination prints for massive prison expansion dis- and creative social labor (and of course, 17 cussed above. there are crucial ways of comprehending The abolitionist teacher must be willing historical liberation struggles in all their to occupy the difficult and often uncom- forms, from guerilla warfare to dance). fortable position of political leadership While I do not expect to arrive at a in the classroom. To some, this reads wholly satisfactory pedagogical endpoint as a direct violation of Freirian concep- anytime soon, and am therefore hesitant tions of critical pedagogy, but I would to offer prescriptive examples of “how to argue that it is really an elaboration and teach” within an abolitionist framework, I amplification of the revolutionary spirit also believe that rigorous experimentation at the heart of Freire’s entire lifework. and creative pedagogical radicalism is the That is, how can a teacher expect her/ very soul of this praxis. There is, in the his students to undertake the courageous end, no teaching formula or pedagogical and difficult work of inhabiting an abo- system that finally fulfills the abolition- litionist positionality—even if only as an ist social vision, there is only a political “academic” exercise—unless the teacher desire that understands the immediacy herself/himself embodies, performs, and of struggling for human liberation from oozes that very same political desire? In precisely those forms of systemic violence fact, it often seems that doing the latter is and institutionalized dehumanization that enough to compel many students (at least are most culturally and politically sanctioned, momentarily) to become intimate and valorized, and taken for granted within familiar with the allegedly impossible. one’s own pedagogical moment. To refuse

14 RADICAL TEACHER • NUMBER 88 or resist this desire is to be unaccountable the prison industrial complex,” although it to the historical truth of our moment, fundamentally and strategically prioritizes in which the structural logic and physi- the prison as a central site for catalyzing ological technologies of social liquidation broader, radical social transformations. In (removal from or effective neutralization significant part, this suggests envisioning within civil society) have merged with and ultimately constructing “a constella- history’s greatest experiment in punitive tion of alternative strategies and institu- human captivity, a linkage that increas- tions, with the ultimate aim of removing ingly lays bare racism’s logical outcome in the prison from the social and ideological genocide.18 landscape of our society.”20 In locating abolitionist praxis within a longer politi- Abolitionist Position and Praxis cal genealogy that anticipates the task of Given the historical context I have remaking the world under transformed briefly outlined, and the practical-theo- material circumstances, this position retical need for situating an abolitionist refracts the most radical and revolutionary praxis within a longer tradition of free- dimensions of a historical Black freedom dom struggle, I contend that there can struggle that positioned the abolition of be no liberatory teaching act, nor can “slavery” as the condition of possibility for there be an adequately critical pedagogi- Black—hence “human”—freedom. cal practice, that does not also attempt to To situate contemporary abolitionism become an abolitionist one. Provisionally, as such is also to recall the U.S. racist I am conceptualizing abolition as a praxis state’s (and its liberal allies’) displacement of liberation that is creative and experi- and effective political criminalization of mental rather than formulaic and rigidly Black radical abolitionism through the th programmatic. Abolition is a “radical” 13 Amendment’s 1865 recodification of political position, as well as a perpetu- the slave relation through the juridical re- ally creative and experimental pedagogy, invention of a racial-carceral relation: because formulaic approaches cannot ade- Amendment XIII quately apprehend the biopolitics, dynam- ic statecraft, and internalized violence of Section 1. Neither slavery nor involun- genocidal and proto-genocidal systems of tary servitude, except as a punishment for human domination. crime whereof the party shall have been As a productive and creative praxis, this duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to conception of abolition posits the material 21 possibility and historical necessity of a their jurisdiction. [emphasis added] social capacity for human freedom based Given the institutional elaborations of on a cultural-economic infrastructure that racial criminalization, policing, and mas- supports the transformation of oppressive sive imprisonment that have prevailed on relations that are the legacy of genocidal the 13th Amendment’s essential authori- conquest, settler colonialism, racial slav- zation to replace a regime of racist chattel ery/capitalism,19 compulsory hetero-pa- slavery with racist carceral state violence, triarchies, and global white supremacy. In it is incumbent on the radical teacher to this sense, abolitionist praxis does not sin- assess the density of her/his entanglement gularly concern itself with the “abolition of in this historically layered condition of NUMBER 88 • RADICAL TEACHER 15 violence, immobilization, and capture. of abolitionist possibility that thinks of Prior to the work of formulating an effec- the critical dialogue as a necessary continu- tive curriculum and teaching strategy for ation of long historical struggles against critically engaging the prison industrial land conquest, slavery, racial colonialism, complex, in other words, is the even more and imperialist war. This also means that difficult work of examining the assump- our discussions take place within a longer tive limitations of any “radical pedagogy” temporal community with those liberation that does not attempt to displace an epis- struggles, such that we are neither “crazy” temological and cultural common sense in nor “isolated.” I have seen students and which the relative order and peace of the teachers speak radical truth to power classroom is perpetually reproduced by the under difficult and vulnerable circum- systemic disorder and deep violence of the stances based on this understanding that prison regime. they are part of a historical record. In relation to the radical challenging of I have had little trouble “convincing” common sense discussed above, another most students—across distinctions of critical analytical tool for building an race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and abolitionist pedagogy entails the rigorous, geography—of the gravity and emergency scholarly dismantling of the “presentist” of our historical moment. It is the analyti- and deeply ahistorical understanding of cal, political, and practical move toward policing and prisons. Students (and many an abolitionist positionality that is (perhaps teachers) frequently enter such dialogues predictably) far more challenging. This is with an utterly mystified conception of in part due to the fraudulent and stubborn the policing and prison apparatus, and default position of centrist-to-progressive do not generally understand that 1) these liberalism/reformism (including assertions apparatuses in their current form are very of “civil” and “human” rights) as the only recent creations, and have not been around feasible or legible response to reaction- “forever”; and 2) the rise of these institu- ary, violent, racist forms of state power. tional forms of criminalization, domestic Perhaps more troublesome, however, is war, and mass-scale imprisonment forms that this resistance to engaging with abo- one link in a historical chain of genocidal litionist praxis seems to also derive from and proto-genocidal mobilizations of the a deep and broad epistemological and racist state that regularly take place as cultural disciplining of the political imagi- part of the deadly global process of U.S. nation that makes liberationist dreams nation-building. In other words, not only unspeakable. This disciplining is most is the prison regime a very recent inven- overtly produced through hegemonic state tion of the state (and therefore is neither and cultural apparatuses and their rep- a “permanent” nor indestructible institu- resentatives (including elected officials, tional assemblage), but it is institution- popular political pundits and public intel- ally and historically inseparable from the lectuals, schools, family units, religious precedent and contemporaneous struc- institutions, etc.), but is also compounded tures of large-scale racist state violence. through the pragmatic imperatives of Asserting the above as part of the core many liberal and progressive nonprofit analytical framework of the pedagogical organizations and social movements that structure can greatly enable a discussion reproduce the political limitations of the

16 RADICAL TEACHER • NUMBER 88 nonprofit industrial complex.22 In this ticulated, at the rule and whim of the state context, the liberationist historical iden- and its designated representatives (police, tifications hailed by an abolitionist social parole officers, school teachers). The imagination also require that such repres- prison regime is the assumptive premise sion of political-intellectual imagination of classroom teaching generally. While be fought, demystified, and displaced. many of us must live in labored denial Perhaps, then, there is no viable or of this fact in order to teach as we must defensible pedagogical position other than about “American democracy,” “freedom,” an abolitionist one. To live and work, and “(civil) rights,” there are opportune learn and teach, and survive and thrive in moments in which it is useful to come a time defined by the capacity and politi- clean: the vast majority of what occurs cal willingness to eliminate and neutralize in U.S. classrooms—from preschool to populations through a culturally valorized, graduate school—cannot accommodate state sanctioned nexus of institutional the bare truth of the proto-genocidal violence, is to better understand why abo- prison regime as a violent ordering of the litionist praxis in this historical moment world, a primary component of civil soci- is primarily pedagogical, within and against ety/school, and a material presence in our the “system” in which it occurs. While everyday teaching acts. it is conceivable that in future moments, As teachers, we are institutionally hailed abolitionist praxis can focus more cen- to the service of genocide management, in trally on matters of (creating and not sim- which our pedagogical labor is variously ply opposing) public policy, infrastructure engaged in mitigating, valorizing, cri- building, and economic reorganization, tiquing, redeeming, justifying, lamenting, the present moment clearly demands a and otherwise reproducing or tolerating convening of radical pedagogical ener- the profound and systemic violence of gies that can build the collective human the global-historical U.S. nation build- power, epistemic and knowledge appara- ing project. As “radical” teachers, we are tuses, and material sites of learning that politically hailed to betray genocide man- are the precondition of authentic and agement in order to embrace the urgent liberatory social transformations. challenge of genocide abolition. The The prison regime is the institutional- short-term survival of those populations ization and systemic expansion of mas- rendered most immediately vulnerable to sive human misery. It is the production the mundane and spectacular violence of of bodily and psychic disarticulation on this system, and the long-term survival multiple scales, across different physi- of most of the planet’s human popula- ological capacities. The prison industrial tion (particularly those descended from complex is, in its logic of organization survivors of enslavement, colonization, and its production of common sense, at conquest, and economic exploitation), is least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison significantly dependent on our willing- regime is inseparable from—that is, pres- ness to embrace this form of pedagogical ent in—the schooling regime in which audacity. teachers are entangled. Prison is not sim- ply a place to which one is displaced and where one’s physiological being is disar- NUMBER 88 • RADICAL TEACHER 17 Notes these different carceral sites, but rather to 1 According to the Bureau of Justice indicate that each of those sites emerges Statistics, the imprisoned population in from a shared institutional genealogy in 2008 was over 2.3 million, including more “the prison/penitentiary.” than 785,000 in jail (Jail Inmates at Mid- year 2008, March 2009, NCJ 225709) and 5 Here I am working from Michel Fou- over 1.5 million in state and federal prisons cault’s notion of an episteme as “the strate- (Prisoners in 2008, December 2009, NCJ gic apparatus which permits of separating 228417). Census data reported in 1999 out from among all the statements which (the most recent available data), on the are possible those that will be acceptable other hand, shows over 130,000 children within… a field of scientificity, and which incarcerated under some form of “juve- it is possible to say are true or false.” nile corrections,” (see Melissa Sickmund, Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Juveniles in Corrections, Office of Juvenile Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 Justice and Delinquency Prevention, June (Colin Gordon, ed.) (trans. Colin Gordon) 2004, NJC 202885; and Daniel P. Mears, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 197. “Exploring State-Level Variation in Juve- 6 See Douglas S. Massey and Nancy nile Incarceration Rates: Symbolic Threats A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segre- and Competing Explanations,” The Prison gation and the Making of the Underclass Journal, Volume 86, Number 4, December (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 2006, 470-490). Press, 1993).

2 See João Costa Vargas, Never Meant 7 See Sally E. Hadden, Slave to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and Diaspora Communities (Lanham, MD: the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). University Press, 2001).

3 See Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney- 8 See Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: Lind (Eds.), Invisible Punishment: The Col- The Social Construction of Native American lateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment Criminality (Austin: University of Texas (New York: The New Press, 2002); see Press, 1998) and Ward Churchill, A Little especially Jeremy Travis, “Invisible Pun- Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial ishment: An Instrument of Social Exclu- in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San sion,” 15-36; Gwen Rubinstein and Debbie Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). Mukamal, “Welfare and Housing—Denial of Benefits to Drug Offenders,” 37-49; 9 See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Donald Braman, “Families and Incarcera- Earth (1963) (trans. Richard Philcox) (New tion,” 117-135; and Beth E. Richie, “The York: Grove Press, 2004); C.L.R. James, Social Impact of Mass Incarceration on The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture Women,” 136-149. and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963); and Albert 4 While there are important bureau- Memmi, Racism (trans. Steve Martinot) cratic, juridical, geographic, and institu- (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota tional distinctions to be drawn between Press, 2000). the multiple sites of state-proctored incar- ceration, I have chosen to use the rhetori- 10 See Damien Schnyder, First Strike: cal marker of “prison” to encompass this The Effect of the Prison Regime Upon Public spatial and institutional form. This is not Education and Black Masculinity in Los to occlude or obscure the specificity of Angeles County, California (Ph.D. Disserta-

18 RADICAL TEACHER • NUMBER 88 tion, University of Texas); Victor M. Rios, izing California (Berkeley: University of “The Hyper-Criminalization of Black and California Press, 2007). Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration,” Souls: A Critical Journal of 16 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 27. 8, Issue 2, 2006, 40-54; and Henry A. 17 See Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall Giroux, “Mis/Education and Zero Toler- ance: Disposable Youth and the Politics of California’s Radical Prison Movement of Domestic Militarization,” boundary 2, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Volume 28, Number 3, 2001, 61-94. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, The Oxford History of the Prison: the Practice of 11 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Punishment in Western Society (New York: (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), Oxford University Press, 1995); Angela Y. 39. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?; Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch (Eds.), The Violence of 12 See Andrea Smith, “Soul Wound: Incarceration (New York: Routledge, 2009); the Legacy of Native American Schools,” Jamie Bissonette, When the Prisoners Ran Amnesty International Magazine, Sum- Walpole: a True Story in the Movement for mer 2003, (access date January 8, 2010) Prison Abolition (Cambridge, MA: South http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/ End Press, 2008). summer_2003/soul_wound/; Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro 18 See Joy James, Chapter 1 “Erasing the (1933) (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publica- Spectacle of Racialized State Violence,” tions, 2005); W.E.B. DuBois, Black Recon- Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, struction in America (1935) (New York: Free and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: Press, 1998); and Renato Constantino, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), “The Mis-Education of the Filipino,” Jour- 24-43. nal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 1, No. 1 19 See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: (1970), 20-36. the Making of the Black Radical Tradition 13 See Dylan Rodríguez, Chapter 2, (1983) (Chapel Hill: University of North “Domestic War Zones and the Extremities Carolina Press, 2000). of Power: Conceptualizing the U.S. Prison 20 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Regime,” Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radi- 107. cal Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 21 “Transcript of 13th Amendment to Press, 2006), 39-74. the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slav- ery (1865),” (access date January 8, 2010) 14 Critical Resistance website, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc. “What is the PIC?” (access date php?doc=40&page=transcript. December 14, 2009) http://critical- resist.live.radicaldesigns.org/article. 22 Dylan Rodríguez, “The Political Logic php?preview=1&cache=0&id=58. of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,”The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the 15 See Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s authorita- Non-Profit Industrial Complex (INCITE! tive study of the emergence of the Cali- th Women of Color Against Violence, Eds.) fornia prison system in the later 20 and st (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), early 21 centuries, Golden Gulag: Prisons, 21-40. Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Global-

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