Prisons exist specifically to separate and isolate people from society and their communities. The impact of such separation is deepened by punitive stigmatization, fear-mongering, racism, barriers to communication with the outside, and a lack of accountability or transparency about what is happening inside. State-sanctioned disappearances (of people into prisons and prisoners into solitary confinement), tight control on information, a normalized culture of dehumanization and brutality, staff impunity, and a political commitment to the view that prisons are necessary responses to harm all contribute to a sense of carceral inevitability and the uselessness of resistance.

An abolitionist anthropology pedagogy prepared to confront and contest these realities thus must incorporate critical approaches that do many things simultaneously: reveal and attack the supremacist, racist, and colonial roots of the contemporary prison industry and master narratives about the need for prisons; model alternative forms of community building through creating classroom and community cultures of radical care and belonging; build bridges of communication outside of state surveillance that span prison walls; demonstrate the possibilities of alternative ways of responding to harm; and open supportive spaces for incarcerated scholars to pursue and share research of their own design.

Maine has been an interesting place to pursue these aims. Over the past five years, the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC) has experimented with expanding higher education and scholarship opportunities for people in prison in collaboration with outside colleges and community groups. The impact of the COVID epidemic, a significant Mellon grant to the University of Maine at Augusta that supported technology investments, and support from leadership in Maine’s Department of Corrections provided openings for extending internet access inside Maine’s prison facilities, which now provide Wi-Fi on a limited and hierarchical basis to adult students incarcerated in all Maine prisons. As internet access and a more progressive attitude toward communication across prison walls expanded, new opportunities for liberatory education based in abolitionist pedagogies became possible.

This post focuses on Colby College’s higher education in prison program, one of a number of efforts over the past five years in Maine to build community across prison walls based in a praxis of liberatory co-learning and abolitionist commitments to transformative justice.[1]

Colby Across the Walls (CATW)

Colby College is a small liberal arts school which only offers undergraduate degrees in the liberal arts. During 2021-23, we offered an “Across the Walls” program with two formats: 1) specially designed and designated courses in which incarcerated students could enroll, at no cost, alongside students on campus; and 2) courses taught by incarcerated professors. CATW courses ensured that incarcerated students comprised one-half to one-third of each CATW class, except for CATW courses taught by incarcerated faculty members, who are not allowed by MDOC policy to teach incarcerated students.

The CATW model was explicitly rooted in abolitionist pedagogy (Castro and Brawn 2017; Love 2019; Rodriguez 2010). The CATW mission statement reads:

In collaborative classrooms across prison and college walls, Colby Across the Walls (CATW) aims to build community by creating spaces of intellectual freedom and emotional flourishing. CATW does this primarily through offering courses that include students and faculty based on the Colby campus and students and faculty incarcerated in Maine’s prisons. Our courses balance inside and outside students, open teaching opportunities to inside scholars, bridge our siloed spaces of residence, and build intellectual relationships based on dignity, mutual respect, and a commitment to shared learning. CATW courses will be held in person at least eight times during the semester. CATW courses are content-rich, based in emancipatory pedagogies, and dedicated to building strong multifaceted relationships, nurturing individual voice and self-awareness, cultivating active listening, and building trust. CATW seeks to open collaborative spaces where creative work can emerge, new imaginaries can form, and shared ethical visions can take shape.

Following Bettina Love, the CATW program grew from an abolitionist pedagogy which required an explicitly political stance by the faculty: “Abolitionist teaching is choosing to engage in the struggle for educational justice knowing that you have the ability and human right to refuse oppression and refuse to oppress others, mainly your students” (2019, 11). To do this in college classes which included incarcerated students, we began with an open conversation with currently incarcerated students about their priorities. As Robert Scott advises, “we must learn how to hear the students’ articulation of what is needed. We have to embrace the students’ interests where they are, and listen to what they need to get somewhere with their work” (2013, 29).  Their advice included the following instructions.

Please do not assume the following:

• Do not assume all incarcerated students learn the same way. Do not assume all incarcerated students have access to computers or know how to use them.
• Do not assume all incarcerated students have had a history with education prior to their incarceration.
• Do not assume all incarcerated students are in your class for the same academic motivation/reasons.
• Do not assume all incarcerated students will feel comfortable sharing or will be allowed to share their justice history.
• Do not assume all incarcerated students get along outside of the classroom and can work together as a close-knit group.
• Do not assume all incarcerated students are strong self-advocates.
• Do not assume all incarcerated students carry trauma that will interfere with their learning experience.
• Do not assume incarcerated students value education more or less than traditional students.
• Do not assume incarcerated students have ready and complete access to research materials.
• Do not assume incarcerated students have unlimited access to the internet or the education department.
• Do not assume incarcerated students have the same academic freedom as traditional students.
• Do not assume incarcerated students have freedom of movement including arriving at the class on time and/or remaining in the class.
• Do not assume incarcerated students see themselves as less than traditional students.
• Do not assume incarcerated students do not have responsibilities (work, programs, civic groups, volunteering, etc.).
• Do not assume incarcerated students do not face life challenges (divorces, family emergencies, economic hardship, etc.).
• Do not assume incarcerated students need to be catered to in their course work.
• Do not assume incarcerated students will “con” their way through the course work.
• Please do not assume, ask!

Building on this foundation, the CATW program developed the following expectations:

• Half the class meetings would be held in person. Students from minimum security prisons would travel to campus for some classes and students on campus would travel to the prisons for other classes. For classes with students in maximum security prisons, students from campus would travel to the prison for in-person classes at least eight times during the semester. The classes would be a surveillance-free space.
• Incarcerated students were invited to take as many CATW classes as they wished, for which they received Colby College credit, which was transferrable to their degree-granting programs at University of Maine at August or Washington County Community College.
• All incarcerated students were registered as Colby students, with Colby IDs, Colby emails, and access to all of Colby’s online services (Zoom, library, IT help, participation to the extent possible in student groups, etc).
• Incarcerated students were allowed to Zoom by appointment and email about class-related matters with their peers and faculty on campus and maintain communication with their former faculty for references and educational mentoring after the conclusion of the semester.
• Colby paid an incarcerated Teaching Assistant for some CATW classes, who offered office hours and assistance for inside students who were new to technology and online research.
• The incarcerated professor taught on Zoom, received the standard salary for adjunct professor, and was considered a member of the faculty with full access to campus resources, including non-surveilled Zoom meetings and office hours with students and other faculty members.

We also held campus-wide meetings to explain CATW pedagogy and provide resources to faculty and students interested in abolitionist pedagogy, developed a liberatory education guide for faculty from other colleges and universities who taught courses inside prisons, offered CATW versions of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, and opened discussions on campus about expanding DEI initiatives to include those who are justice-impacted.

It is important to note that many of these practices depart from the national standard for “inside-out” classes. Many prison education programs do not treat incarcerated students in the class as fully enrolled college students on the home campus who are provided with campus student IDs, email accounts, and access to campus resources; do not allow communication via email and Zoom outside of class time between faculty and incarcerated students, between incarcerated and non-incarcerated classmates, or between incarcerated students at different prisons; and mandate that communication between faculty and incarcerated students cease immediately upon the conclusion of the semester. Some do not even provide college credit from the college offering the class (MIT, for example, offers classes in Maine prisons but will not offer incarcerated students MIT college credit. Rather, incarcerated students who take MIT classes receive credit for their MIT class from a local community college.) Additionally, Colby’s willingness to employ a faculty member who was incarcerated in the state’s maximum-security prison (and another while he was on home confinement after being released from prison) was pathbreaking nationwide (see Field 2023). Negotiating for this administrative and bureaucratic structure required buy-in from both campus and MDOC leadership, and we recognize that much of what we were able to do was unprecedented elsewhere and utterly dependent on the consent and support of the top administrators at each institution.

CATW classes typically involved several components and practices of abolitionist pedagogy:

• community guidelines created through a collective, student-centered process of generating a list of agreements that everyone supported, which were revisited periodically throughout the semester to evaluate their effectiveness
• the use of community building exercises and/or ice-breakers in each class meeting, to allow everyone to get to know each other as fellow human beings
• circle practice for structuring discussion some or all of the time, to ensure a “shift in emphasis from individualized achievement to collective knowledge production” (Rosas et al. 2024) and a culture of inclusivity, deep listening, and mutual respect, in a non-hierarchical co-learning space
• deconstructing the presumption that outside professors bring knowledge in and control access to that knowledge. By utilizing circle practice, co-learning, and student-driven assessment practices with the explicit recognition that incarcerated students are the experts in their experiences, CATW sought to counter the criticism of many prison education programs that expect incarcerated students to be submissive recipients of knowledge brought in by teachers on the outside (Jones III 2014)
• multiple, flexible, learner-centered options for completing classwork, as determined by student access needs
• extra and trauma-informed supports for student success
• a Freirian approach to critical pedagogy that prioritized community building and the co-construction of knowledge about how power works and can be contested, and modeling this approach through relations of care and trust amongst students and faculty (see Castro and Brawn 2017; hooks 1994; Novek 2019)
• a grounding in abolitionist literature about incarceration and transformative justice (see, for example, this list utilized by CATW faculty).
• above all, a commitment to mutual care, love, and joy in building relationships of solidarity. Bettina Love writes, “Abolitionist teaching asks educators to acknowledge and accept America and its policies as anti-Black, racist, discriminatory, and unjust and to be in solidarity with dark folx and poor folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving. [The focus is] on love, well-being, and joy,” as well as refusal of oppression (2019, 13).

During 2022-23, CATW classes were accompanied by an Abolitionist Pedagogy conversation series that met once a month on Zoom with a guest speaker. The series kicked off with a panel of three incarcerated scholars pursuing graduate work who established the primary questions about the praxis of liberatory education in carceral settings. Incarcerated scholars Zoomed into the meetings every month for free-flowing, unsurveilled discussion.

What Did it all Mean?

CATW only ran for 4 semesters before being suspended when the director (Besteman) was suspended by MDOC (although currently CATW is being retooled for a project by an organization called Reentry Sisters which supports women in reentry to complete their college degrees). The opportunities that had opened in 2021 to allow CATW to adhere to principles of liberatory education and abolitionist pedagogy have since narrowed dramatically with the departure of the MDOC administrator most supportive of these efforts. Access to the internet for incarcerated scholars has been severely reduced and the control of internet access has become a tool of punishment, with incarcerated scholars routinely losing access to the internet for lengthy periods of time. Currently most college classes are entirely online and many are asynchronous, which destroys any efforts toward classroom-based community building and mutual care. The ability of incarcerated scholars to Zoom with their professors and classmates, or to join professional lecture series or conferences, has been severely curtailed, and professors found in violation or who are accused of becoming too close to their students are suspended or have their classes cancelled. A much tighter structure of surveillance now monitors what incarcerated scholars are communicating to people on the outside. In short, the dramatic curtailments seem to reflect a general feeling amongst DOC staff that internet access had become far too permissive, and that, despite secure firewalls which greatly constrained what incarcerated internet users could access online, incarcerated scholars were accessing the internet for purposes not linked tightly enough to their educational programs.

On the positive side, the CATW approach created relationships that continued beyond the demise of the program. Some students who have been released now work on projects with their former professors, and some former students still keep in touch with their incarcerated professor. The campus was introduced to the normalized presence of incarcerated scholars as fellow Colby students and faculty, which precipitated campus-wide conversations about what responses to harm based in restorative justice rather than punitive carcerality could look like. The program opened the possibility of employment for incarcerated professionals at free world wages with outside employers. And CATW can still stand as an aspiration to the possibility of liberatory education inside prisons in collaboration with college campuses.

But there is a cautionary tale here. Abolitionist pedagogy inside prison spaces is profoundly fraught and, I believe, seldom sustainable unless top corrections administrators demand compliance from lower-level staff, many of whom, it seems, object to prisoners even having access to college classes. Because access to education inside prisons is a privilege and not a right, college classes can become weaponized spaces, with access used to reward and punish those perceived as committing infractions. That does not mean faculty on the outside should give in to carceral logics in order to sustain higher education in prison programs; it just means we have to fight harder.

Footnotes

[1] Some other efforts included a Justice Think Tank for incarcerated scholars who received compensation for their policy research from the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison and a public humanities initiative called Freedom & Captivity (see also Small 2024), which trained inside facilitators to teach community classes to outside groups about incarceration, liberation, and transformative justice.