TEACHING THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

"Harm comes from prior harm." As Deandra says this, I am sitting in
the back of my classroom, taking notes. My students are sitting in a
circle in the middle of the room, talking to each other about the
questions on the board: "What is the purpose of prison? Do prisons
work?" In front of them are annotated readings, lecture notes, and
typed response papers. They seem to have forgotten that I am there.

Deandra and Lee are discussing what would happen if there were no
prisons. Deandra has just finished telling the story of a boy who,
fearful of his abusive father, suffocates a girl rather than get in
trouble for having a guest over when he is not supposed to. In this
case, who should be punished? The boy who is clearly old enough to
know his actions are wrong? The father who has instilled such
tremendous fear in his son?

If there were no prisons, how would human beings respond to harm like
this? Deandra and Lee wrestle with what Deandra has raised: "Harm
comes from prior harm." People harm others when they have been harmed
themselves-by abuse, poverty, trauma-but prison does not address this
prior harm. According to Deandra, it only adds a new layer of trauma
to that individual, their family, and their community. As Roberto
points out, "When you hurt a person, you hurt a bunch of people
connected to that person." Therefore, prison not only harms inmates,
but their families and communities as well. But what response to harm
is fair to victim, perpetrator, and community? What can stop the cycle
of violence?

Conversations like these happened roughly once a week last year in my
senior humanities class. I was teaching in an alternative school in
Boston Public Schools and working with students who had dropped out,
transferred, or been expelled from their previous schools. Many of my
students struggled with reading complex texts and had never learned
how to make and defend an argument through their writing. I was
determined that they would leave my class confident about their
research, reading, and writing skills, and the proud possessors of a
portfolio that demonstrated those skills. But I was worried about how
to engage students when their school careers had been marked by
serious academic challenges.

Therefore, I decided to begin the year with a Freirean exercise I had
read about in an article by a former teacher at El Puente High School
in Brooklyn, NY. On the first day of class, my students walked in to
see a large "problem tree" drawn on the board. We spent the whole
period filling in the leaves of the tree with the problems we saw in
our local communities, nation, and world. After an hour, the leaves
were filled with words like racism, probation system, rape, and
standardized testing. I explained to students that we would spend the
year studying something on this tree and that what we studied was up to them.

For the next two weeks, the students and I worked to choose one
problem to study together. First, I gave them cards that represented
each of the tree leaves. In pairs, they organized these problems into
categories, and soon we had filled in the branches of our tree with
broader topics: education, poverty, government, violence, and prison.
To give students a glimpse of what the year would be like if we
studied any of these topics, I taught a mini-lesson about each one.
Next, students interviewed someone in their family or community about
the most serious problem that person faced. Most talked about the
economy or violence in the community.

Finally, the students voted to study the U.S. prison system. At the
end of the year, during a feedback circle, Shanell said: "The best
thing about this class was we got to choose what we wanted to learn
about. I did the reading and wrote the papers because I was interested
in this topic."

Relevance in the classroom is a tricky thing. We may deeply believe
that what we teach is relevant to students' lives, but they often
experience school as disconnected from their daily realities. The
things that students do experience may be outside of our interests,
expertise, or comfort zone. When I first started teaching in Boston, I
couldn't have imagined spending a year studying the prison industrial
complex. I needed to listen deeply to students' voices about what was
relevant to their lived experience before I began to make connections
between what I thought was important to study and what they thought
mattered. High student interest in a theme they had chosen themselves
allowed us to delve into historical content more deeply and
facilitated engagement in the academic writing process.

'Neither Slavery nor Involuntary Servitude, Except as a Punishment for
Crime . . .'

During the first half of the year, our class looked at the origins of
today's skyrocketing incarceration rate. We began by looking at
slavery and emancipation and closely analyzing the text of the 13th
Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction" (emphasis added). We investigated the Slave Codes and
Black Codes, as well as the convict lease system and the county chain gang.

This historical context enabled students to engage with an excerpt
from Angela Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis makes the argument that
today's prison system is a reincarnation of slavery, and she calls for
the abolition of prisons as necessary in order to truly bring about
the final abolition of slavery.

Are Prisons Obsolete? is a dense text and one that challenges even
highly skilled readers. Interest alone will not support students'
understanding of a text that is well above their reading level, and
many of my students struggled with even grade-level reading
comprehension. Therefore, I modeled how to actively read a text using
simple reading strategies: pre-reading, annotation, and rereading. As
we read Davis' words aloud, we paused frequently to highlight
questions such as "Are prisons racist institutions?" and "Is racism so
deeply entrenched in the institution of the prison that it is not
possible to eliminate one without eliminating the other?" (26).
Students wrote notes in the margin when we read that both chattel
slavery and the penitentiary "subordinated their subjects to the will
of others" (27). Many students were shocked when they read that
officials who enforced the Mississippi Black Codes often prescribed
the convict lease system or county chain gang as punishment for the
crime of "vagrancy"; the Black Codes "declared vagrant 'anyone who was
guilty of theft, had run away [from a job], was drunk, was wanton in
conduct or speech, had neglected job or family and . . . all other
idle and disorderly persons'" (29).

When students were assigned to finish the excerpt for homework, I
supported their reading by including vocabulary, background on Davis,
and two questions to consider:

What is the connection between slavery and prison?

Who benefits from slavery? Who benefits from prison?

Over the year, I scaffolded access to a variety of texts. Students
read memoirs (the autobiography of Assata Shakur), newspaper articles
("A Mother's Day Plea for Justice" by Johnna Paradis), and comics (The
Real Cost of Prisons Comix), as well as academic texts. I invited
students to come after school every Monday to actively read that
week's text, and many students would join me to do that week's reading
together.

Over the course of the first half of the year, we explored a variety
of topics: the legacy of slavery, prison economics, wealth inequality
in the United States, the war on drugs, motives for incarceration,
inmate rights, resistance movements, and alternatives to
incarceration. Every week we explored two open-ended questions
together. For example, when studying the war on drugs, we considered:

Are prisons racist institutions? If yes, how so? If not, why not?

From 1970 to 2010, the number of people incarcerated in the United
States went from about 325,000 to more than 2 million. How and why did
this happen?

The structure of each week reflected my philosophy that it is
important for students to have a balance of receptive and expressive
experiences. Receptive experiences included listening and reading,
while expressive experiences included speaking and writing. For
example, when we studied the war on drugs, students took notes on a
lecture that included information on Nixon's declaration of war on
drugs in 1971, Reagan's decision to fund this "war" with $1.7 billion,
and the wave of legal changes that swept the country (including New
York's Rockefeller Drug Laws, California's three strikes laws, and the
increases in mandatory minimum sentences).

Then we played a game that helped students understand that race and
class are key determinants in what happens when someone is arrested
for drug use. Each student received an index card stating a
defendant's race, class, occupation, drug possession charge, offense
number (first, second or third), and whether the defendant had
representation from a private lawyer or a public defender. Students
stood in a straight line and listened to the statements I read out
loud: "Take one step back if your defendant is represented by a
private lawyer." "Take one step forward if your defendant is below the
poverty line." The closer you were to the front of the room, the
closer your defendant was to prison.

At the end, students were shocked. The game revealed that race and
class were much stronger determinants in sentencing than the substance
the defendant was using or selling. Students learned that African
American, Native American, Latina/o, Southeast Asian, and poor and
working-class communities are dramatically overrepresented in prison.
In Rafael's words, it was "just crazy" to see that middle-class
college students could use heroin and receive community service, but
people with less privilege could receive a lengthy prison sentence for
the same offense. Students linked the game to the reading they had
done that week and noted that, according to "Prisoners of the War on
Drugs," one of the comics in The Real Cost of Prisons, although
African Americans are 13 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent
of drug users, they comprise "35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent
of drug convictions, [and] 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drugs."

Moving Toward Research and Writing

At the beginning of every year, I survey students about their
experiences with reading and writing. Based on their responses, I
learned that many of my students had never learned how to craft an
argumentative thesis, defend an argument in depth using cited sources,
or create a bibliography. Some were used to handwriting all of their
assignments. Walking into my class, they were shocked to hear that
they had to write eight two-paged papers and a 10- to 12-paged
researched thesis.

Writing is a creative act, an act of communication that can be both
deeply personal and deeply public. I hoped that my students'
engagement in the ideas we were discussing would result in a
commitment to working on their writing about those ideas. However, as
with reading, high student interest is not a guarantor of clear and
thoughtful writing, nor is it a substitute for direct and explicit
writing instruction or structures such as writers' workshops, teacher
and peer feedback, and public forums to exhibit work.

To scaffold students' research and writing skills, the requirements
for writing a paper progressed from simple responses to more
structured response papers. Students began the year by choosing
quotations to respond to and freewriting their responses. Once
students had chosen three quotations and briefly written about them, I
asked them to craft three arguments-each based on the evidence
(quotation) from the text they had selected. We used the metaphor of a
detective who makes an argument about what occurred based on the
evidence that she finds. This metaphor helped my students make
arguments, which we defined as debatable, defendable statements that
are not facts and not opinions, but assertions that can be proven
using evidence and analysis. The structure of argument, evidence, and
analysis helped students craft well-organized paragraphs that
communicated something meaningful to their readers.

For example, here is a paragraph from one of Crystal's early papers
responding to Are Prisons Obsolete?

Prisoners back then were not treated like they were human beings. "The
prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without blankets or
mattresses, and often without clothes" (33). Although they were in
jail they were not provided the proper shelter. They also would get
whipped if they would try to run away. If these examples don't scream
out slavery then I don't know what does. Slavery was abolished but the
prisoners were still being treated as if they were slaves. I think
that it was unfair that the prison guards got to break the law when it
comes down to prisoners.

Once students had mastered finding evidence and making an argument
based on that evidence, I gradually pushed them to start proving their
arguments. For each paper students wrote, I gave them extensive
feedback on the strength of their arguments ("This is a fact, not an
argument"), the strength of their evidence ("Why did you choose this
quotation? I don't see how it helps prove your assertion"), and the
strength of their analysis ("This is very convincing writing. The
examples you use really work to prove your point"). After writing
eight short papers in the first term, most students were able to write
a cohesive, well-structured short response paper. Most importantly,
they were able to make an argument in their writing and defend that
argument through evidence and analysis. They were now ready to tackle
the challenge of researching and writing a thesis.

I gave the students a list of 40 topics that connected in some way to
the U.S. criminal justice system, and they brainstormed more on their
own. We took a trip to the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library,
where students were able to see which topics they had chosen had the
strongest sources available. Some of their final topics included U.S.
practices of extraordinary rendition, the constitutionality of the
death penalty, responses to drug trafficking, and the experiences of
women in prison. After choosing a final topic and selecting six
sources, students began actively reading their sources in preparation
for their thesis. They typed 25 quotations from their sources to build
a body of evidence for their paper and organized their arguments and
evidence into an outline.

When students were ready to construct their thesis statements, I
invited guest teachers into the classroom for a writing workshop so
that each student was able to spend 20 minutes with a teacher
developing a strong, clear thesis statement. By then the students had
had significant experience in crafting arguments, so they were able to
construct strong thesis statements by developing and refining the
larger argument they wanted to make in their papers based on the
smaller, more specific arguments they were making in each section.
Examples of students' thesis statements included:

Prison harms women, manipulates them, and makes them less healthy.

In theory, the Stanford Prison Experiment was ethical, but the real
things that happened during the experiment were unethical.

The U.S. government targeted Puerto Rican independence movements with
surveillance and violence because the government sees the movement as
a threat to U.S. colonialism.

After five weeks of outlining, drafting, revising, and editing,
students turned in their final papers and exhibited them in small peer
review circles that were observed by other students as well as outside
teachers and guests.

Here is an excerpt from Crystal's thesis, comparing prison labor in
the 19th-century Deep South and prison labor in U.S. prisons today:

Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, prison labor was used as a
replacement for slavery. Prisoners worked on state-operated chain
gangs, and they were also leased to private companies and plantations.
Under this new convict lease system, "Blacks suffered far more than
whites, who rarely left the penitentiary walls. In 1882, for example,
126 of 735 black state convicts perished, as opposed to 2 of 83
whites" (Oshinsky 46). "The leasing act was designed for black, not
white convicts" (Oshinsky 41). This act was designed to keep blacks
enslaved even though slavery was abolished. The prison system back
then was a racialized system, just as slavery had been. The white men
in the prisons rarely left the prison, so they never had to do the
type of labor that the African Americans were doing.

It is clear from these two excerpts of her writing that Crystal grew
significantly over the course of the year in her ability to make an
argument, use evidence, and analyze her evidence to prove her
assertions. When I spoke with her on the day she turned her thesis in,
she couldn't quite believe she had written it.

At the end of the year, most students agreed that researching and
writing the thesis was their most rewarding experience in the class,
and all of them felt a keen sense of accomplishment. For me, the most
powerful moment of the year came during one of the peer review circles.

Five students and I were sitting around a table in the middle of the
classroom, while other students and guests watched from an outer
circle. Each of the five had written a paper about the experiences of
incarcerated women or incarcerated parents. Some had chosen to focus
on the perspective of the incarcerated adults ("Moms in Orange
Jumpsuits"), while others had chosen to focus on the perspectives of
children whose parents are incarcerated ("One Child at a Time").
Shauntae was speaking about the experiences of these children, and her
sources included Children with Parents in Prison, edited by Cynthia
Seymour and Creasie Finney Hairston; "Prisoners of a Hard Life," one
of the comics in The Real Cost of Prisons; and Tenacious, a
publication by women in prison for women. Shauntae explained that
children of incarcerated parents "may have lower levels of self-esteem
and [may] be more likely to believe what others say about them and
their parents. They are also more likely to live with a nonparent
caregiver and are therefore at higher risk for abuse or neglect." She
suggested possible solutions for the care and well-being of these
children, proposing increased contact between incarcerated parents and
their children, as well as increased contact between these parents and
the adults in their children's lives, such as teachers, caregivers,
and social workers.

Finally, Shauntae shared that she herself had experienced the
incarceration of a parent: "From my personal experience, having an
incarcerated parent . . . has not been easy, and while [my father] was
gone I have never seen such change in my little brother and myself. .
. . However, I do know that if we had gotten the help and support we
needed, it would have been much easier than what it was for all of us
during that time."

I was moved that she felt comfortable enough to share this very
personal experience in the context of our classroom, and I was even
more moved that the process of writing something for school had served
as an opportunity to process and respond to her own experience.
Moments like these taught me that studying the prison industrial
complex was valuable for students on a personal, political, and
academic level. The class offered students the opportunity to move
beyond pathologizing their own lives, families, and communities by
helping them put their experiences in a broader social context-an
experience that was deeply strengthening for both the students and myself.

Resources

Ahrens, Lois, ed. The Real Cost of Prisons Comix. Oakland, Calif.: PM
Press, 2008.

Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Hampton, Henry, dir. "A Nation of Law?" in Eyes on the Prize video
documentary, Public Broadcasting System, 1987.

Gordon, Ruth. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition
in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.

James, Joy, ed. The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and
Contemporary Prison Writings. New York: SUNY Press, 2005.

Paradis, Johnna. "A Mother's Day Plea for Justice," The Norwalk Hour,
Nov. 28, 2010. raisetheagect.org/paradis.html.

Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987.