My first foray into prison education was a total fluke. During preliminary fieldwork for my doctoral research in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who was employed as an art therapist at the federal psychiatric prison in the city. We met over a beer, and she shared her experience. “Do you think anyone would be interested in music lessons?” I wondered aloud. “Sure!” she responded, “I’ll connect you with one of the programming coordinators.” About a month later, I was sitting in a room near the prison chapel with a dozen men—predominantly Indigenous, reflective of their overrepresentation in Canadian prisons, particularly in the prairies—asking what songs they wanted to learn on the guitar.

Following that initial meeting, I spent a few hours once a week with two groups of four to five men to practice basic chords and play songs like “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Wonderwall,” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” I brought in banged-up but freshly strung acoustic guitars donated by local musicians, and printouts of the chords to about two dozen songs. Without a digital tuner—“sorry ma’am, you can’t bring that in here”—the men learned the painstaking skill of relative tuning.

Over the next two months, I witnessed these outwardly hard men softening into joy, sorrow, and friendship, often reflected in and prompted by their choice of songs.

We make our way through “Mama’s Waiting”—a song about a man who has lived a hard life, looking forward to reuniting with his mother in heaven. As we reach the final strum, one man quietly comments, “I never had a mother.” A hush of unspoken empathy descends upon the group.

Another man asks (somewhat sheepishly) if we can learn John Legend’s “All of Me,” so he can play it for his girlfriend when he gets out. The other men tease him, initially, but then hunker down and get to work, finding the shape of the chords, talking about the girls waiting for them on the outside, too.

We play “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and the men lean into the lyrics—put your guns in the ground, we don’t need them anymore. The utter gravity of the song reverberates against hard, cement walls.

The transformation of austere carceral spaces marked by social norms rooted in toxic masculinity into places of camaraderie, open conversation, and emotional connection is something consistently highlighted by both teachers and students in the context of more formal prison education programs, like Inside-Out (I-O) and Walls to Bridges (W2B).^[1]  The institutional resistance to this transformative potential is, unfortunately, likewise well documented. Less documented is the occasional shock of institutional violence, sometimes so slippery there is no one—and no real way—to hold to account.

For two weeks, we did one-on-one sessions, so the men could work on specific skills. I was surprised when one of the men—an aspiring poet and total keener—missed his first session. The next week, he was there, on time, escorted by two correctional officers (COs). When he sat down, I could see he was shaking. Also visible were fresh signs of self-harm: stitches holding together what he had torn apart. I told him I’d missed him the prior week. He told me he’d been sleeping: the correctional officers hadn’t woken him up to escort him off-unit. Was this clumsiness or cruelty? Regardless, it was a reminder of who was in charge: who held the power, and who did not (it also showed me how much one program can mean to a prisoner and how high the stakes can be). Similar reminders came in the form of classes cancelled last-minute due to institutional lockdown, the guitars I distributed to each unit for the purpose of practicing given out by COs to whomever they chose, and, ultimately, in management’s decision to “not offer the guitar program anymore” due to a shift toward standardized programming across the country.

Before leaving Saskatoon at the end of the summer, I did two things to try to maintain the momentum and connection we had built: I recorded simplified versions of the songs we’d been learning and burned them onto CDs so the men could play along, and I set up a P.O. Box so we could write letters to one another. The programming coordinator thought the CDs would be well received—but they were not received at all. Rather, I was informed by a CO at the front desk that the men were only allowed to possess “professionally recorded” CDs. The P.O. Box caused an even bigger stir. I had put a lot of thought and care into this: there was nothing in the volunteer training orientation prohibiting letter writing between volunteers and prisoners, and utilizing a P.O. Box concealed my personal address and last name. Nevertheless, this connection via snail mail correspondence prompted repeated inquiries and chastisements from the facility, including a phone call well over a year after I had closed the P.O. Box, asking if I had been receiving letters from a specific individual and reminding me that “these guys know guys everywhere.”

The guitar program, initially lauded by facility management and celebrated at the annual volunteer appreciation night (where staff announced my full name in front of an audience of volunteers and prisoners), praised for its positive impact on prisoners and on the institution, had become a mechanism of surveillance and punishment before it was unilaterally terminated. Despite this institutional authority and violence, I jumped at the chance to be a volunteer facilitator for the Inspired Minds: All Nations Creative Writing Program (IM) in provincial facilities the following summer.

Abolitionist Pedagogy In Prison?

This piece takes up one of the questions posed in the introduction to this series: is it possible to develop abolitionist practices and strategies while teaching in carceral spaces? In answering this question, I draw on my own experience, seeking to broaden the conversation beyond well-established programs (notably, I-O and W2B), which have inspired much reflection and writing since the turn of the 21st century, toward the expansion of opportunities for mutual, reciprocal learning relationships between the broader community and incarcerated people.^[2]  In so doing, I reflect on the crucial yet complicated task of forging pedagogical strategies within the context of carcerality—and related pitfalls and constraints—that is perhaps most pronounced in prisons but which inf(l)ects other educational settings, including university classrooms.

Constraints

There are a myriad of common constraints across prison education programs, including:

• Low prioritization of prison education programs such as I-O, W2B, and IM (which aren’t core correctional programs).
• Lack of control over when and where classes are held and over eligibility (prisoners are often handpicked by staff).
• Classroom environments can be a traditional classroom, with desks, chairs, and a chalkboard. I have also facilitated classes in a subterranean cement bunker without windows, suspicious ceiling stains, and a floor that slants toward a sewer grate.
• Sudden departure of students cut from the program due to institutional misconduct, transfer to another institution, or release. IM is only eight weeks long which, compared to a full semester course, mitigates—but does not prevent—attrition.
• Medication: overuse of psychotropic medication within carceral institutions means prisoners are often heavily medicated, which impacts focus and engagement. Classes may also be disrupted by medication administration.^[3]

Perhaps most concerning, prison education can be weaponized—wielded by staff and management as a tool for discipline and punishment. One of my IM classes, at a facility for women, initially had eight students. The first class went well, but when I returned the next week, there were only two students left. The other six students had been implicated in an incident, which meant that they were no longer classified as minimum risk and thus no longer eligible for the program. In another class at a men’s facility, I held my tongue as I witnessed a prisoner who had “lost the privilege” of participating in programming as he was escorted out of the classroom by two correctional officers. Several fellow students began protesting what they saw as an unjust punishment but were subdued when threatened with their own removal from the program.

Possibilities

Despite considerable constraints and challenges, prison education programs have many potential benefits, both short- and long-term, personal and pragmatic, individual and collective. Participation offers an opportunity for mobility and meaningful activity: a chance to move through the facility and spend time in another space. These spaces are different not only insofar as they are not the unit, or the cell, but because of the relational ethics that underpin such programs and that transform carceral spaces into places of possibility. Through centering abolitionist and Indigenous place-based epistemologies, pedagogies, and ethics, the hierarchy of teacher/student that animates Western approaches to education is upended, disrupting “carceral logics of divide and conquer” (Van Styvendale 2022, 81) and facilitating interpersonal connection, emotional bonding, healing, and the formation of collectivities.

It doesn’t matter whether the space is a prison classroom with big windows overlooking the yard, or a 15-foot square visiting room with tiny slits of vertical windows with tables and chairs bolted to the floor—for the duration of the class, it is transformed into a “safe enough space” where prisoners can open up, sharing stories and feelings normally concealed in the cis-heteronormative and “hypermasculine”⁠ institutional environment (Piché 2015, 56–57, 88–91). One of the most common pieces of feedback I have received—informally and on the anonymous feedback forms circulated during the final class of the eight-week program—is that participants have felt comfortable sharing things they have never spoken out loud before, experiences they refuse to share with therapeutic professionals, who, in their words “just don’t get it.” Toward the end of the program, a shared sense of common humanity, of common struggle, emerges as participants validate each other’s experiences and celebrate their efforts.

Pragmatically, prison education programs can also be leveraged as evidence of rehabilitation to support applications for parole, escorted temporary absences, or transfer to a halfway house, or to argue for reduced sentencing. A certificate of completion from a higher learning institution can be a valuable bargaining chip for prisoners—as can a letter of support from a program facilitator. In this way, prison education programs can be wielded as tools to reduce the number of people in cages. This is the paradox we face as abolitionist teachers: how do we harness the potentiality of prison education while also navigating the reality that these programs are literally embedded within—and are shaped by—systems of carceral oppression? This paradox is perhaps most obvious within the context of the prison, but it exists in other teaching institutions as well—including higher education classrooms. The core principles of I-O, W2B, and IM are, after all, rooted in critical pedagogies developed in response to the traditional classroom, including Paulo Freire’s (2014) pedagogy of the oppressed, within which teaching is neither something done to or for the student, but with them, and bell hooks’s critical pedagogy, which emphasizes that “the classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility” (1994, 207).

Teaching Tools

There is much in the pedagogical practices and abolitionist praxis of programs like IM, I-O, and W2B—what Fontaine (2022) refers to as “stealth abolition”—that can be drawn upon to improve our teaching elsewhere.^[4] Disrupting the traditional hierarchy of teacher/student—and more broadly, the distinction of us vs. them that undergirds “carceral logics of divide and conquer”—is an ongoing practice.

1. Collective Learning Agreement

Every IM, IO, and W2B class begins with the collective formulation of a learning agreement—students and instructors reflect on what contributes to an environment conducive to learning, expressing needs and setting expectations together (e.g., Gallivan et al. 2023, 140–41). Student-directed learning, collective ownership of/responsibility for the classroom (including choosing what to learn) is not always possible due to the rules and expectations of university faculties—but regardless of the syllabus, you can begin each class with a collective learning agreement.

2. In-Class Activities and Engagement

Shifting toward assessments based on reflection, participation, and group activities and away from written assignments and exams reflects the reality that spaces outside of the container of the classroom may not be as conducive to learning. Such activities also encourage a two-way flow of knowledge, disrupting the traditional hierarchy of teacher/student, which reflects the heart of abolition: embracing the Other, unsettling the dichotomy of us/them which the carceral industry both reproduces and relies upon. This fosters a different type of learning community, one where everyone has valuable knowledge to bring to the table, and everyone has something to learn. In carceral institutions, this includes knowledge of life behind bars and conditions of confinement—knowledge that the non-incarcerated are literally barred from accessing.

Abolitionist Pedagogy as ‘Falling Short’

Prison education is equally crucial and fraught—as is, arguably, all education. It is my experience, and my belief, that the possibilities outweigh the constraints. Simply put, I think it’s worth it. Is it possible for (prison) education to contribute toward abolition? Absolutely. Is there a possibility of cooptation or weaponization by the institution? Inevitably—whether or not the institution is explicitly carceral. As an anthropologist, I am trained to embrace multiplicity and ambivalence, and to attend to the everyday alongside the structural. This is how I approach the question of whether we can engage in liberatory pedagogical practices within repressive institutions. This approach sidesteps debates over whether carceral spaces can be anything other than repressive, neocolonial tools of the state. It nuances structural critiques of prison programming by centering evidence of its transformative potential while being rooted in the reality of violence and constraint.

I admit I have little interest in debating the possibility or purity of abolitionist pedagogies in prisons—or elsewhere: the reality of racialized mass incarceration across Turtle Island is too pressing. I don’t want to be mired in debate at the expense of doing. Nothing is ever perfect. We, as abolitionist educators, will fail—inevitably, in foreseen and unforeseen ways. We will also succeed in ways we cannot yet imagine. These are lessons I bring with me, into other classrooms, out into the world.

An abolitionist ethics tells us we must act with love, however we can, and we must see possibility within systems that oppress, within structures designed to “divide and conquer.” To be an abolitionist, El Jones observes, is to simultaneously believe that confinement as conflict management must end while putting money in prisoners’ phone and canteen accounts, knowing that this “paradoxically feeds” the carceral industry—because the “small pleasure” of buying something from the canteen, or a phone call with a loved one, makes life a little less unbearable (2022, 196). An abolitionist ethics instructs us to do what we can to improve conditions of confinement, while working to abolish prisons—despite the paradox, despite the imperfection. This is the most important lesson I learned as a prison educator: how to—in Jones’ words—“make a home in this falling short” (2022, 196). This entails working toward liberation despite the threat of cooptation—or worse yet, the weaponization of our efforts—and the reality of constraint.

Footnotes

[1] See, for example, Drabinski & Harkins (2013); W2B special issue, Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (Pollack & Mayor 2023). I-O is a prison education program rooted in the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and bell hooks and founded in part by prisoners. Courses are offered via accredited post-secondary institutions and taught by professors to both “Inside” (incarcerated) and “Outside” (non-incarcerated) students. Classes take place inside correctional facilities, bringing Outside students and instructors into carceral spaces and enabling Inside students to participate in university classes. Since its inception in the late 1990s, I-O has spread across the United States and branched out to the UK, with dozens of universities and institutions offering courses. Canadian counterpart W2B, modeled after I-O with the crucial addition of centering place-based Indigenous knowledges, was established in 2011 in Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ontario, and has likewise spread across the country to fifteen universities/colleges and correctional facilities—and across the Atlantic to France. Years of evaluations of such programs provide ample evidence to support the transformative potential of critical prison education, in terms of both individual and societal change (Allred 2009; Davis 2011; Mishne et al. 2012; Link 2016; King et al. 2019; Alexander et al. 2023; Fayter 2023; Pollack 2024). However, I-O and W2B are predominantly offered only in federal facilities and are thus inaccessible to the majority of incarcerated persons.

[2] I am thinking specifically of prisoners serving short sentences and/or remanded to pretrial custody who thus have limited access to programming, including I-O and W2B. In Canada, lengthy court proceedings and higher numbers of people remanded to pretrial custody means that more people are spending more time in provincial facilities (and, in the United States, in state prisons and local jails) where conditions of confinement are tantamount to warehousing. Inspired Minds: All Nations Creative Writing Program (IM) was founded in 2011 at the Saskatoon Correctional Center (SCC), following a writing workshop organized by cultural coordinator Diann Block and white settler scholar Nancy Van Styvendale and attended by ten prisoners and ten students from the University of Saskatchewan. IM is an eight-week program offered to provincially incarcerated persons, including remanded prisoners, who otherwise have extremely limited access to programming and other forms of meaningful activity. Certificates of completion are provided by the Universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Over forty classes have been offered at SCC to over 200 prisoners. As a volunteer with the program, I facilitated three classes at a provincial facility for men and four at a facility for women and so have experienced the transformative potential—and the pitfalls—of such programs firsthand.

[3] One of the IM classes I facilitated took place in the evening, so as not to conflict or compete with core correctional programming. However, prisoners were called to the nursing station to get their meds about one hour in. Class was routinely disrupted as several students left and then returned to the unit, often with a marked difference in comportment, energy, and attention—i.e., feeling groggy from the effects of their medication—upon their return.

[4] In his dissertation—a critical evaluation of abolitionist pedagogy within prison education programs in North America—Fontaine writes, “Stealth Abolition is a subtle way that folks who encounter carceral spaces resist, dismantle, and undo the material conditions of neo-slavery” (2022, 56).