More than Access: College Programs in Prison and Transforming Education

I. Prison as Education

Systems of incarceration have long been intertwined with systems of education. On the one hand, people caught up in systems of incarceration have historically been labeled in need of education. Here incarceration answers the question: what do you do with people who need to be educated to conform to the standards and expectations of their society? On the other hand, people caught up in systems of incarceration have historically been labeled uneducable. Here incarceration answers the question: what do you do with people who cannot be trained to conform to the standards and expectations of their society? This section takes up the contradictory historical discourses of incarceration as education to explore how neoliberalism poses “new” questions about education and incarceration and institutes restricted answers through specific systems of governmentalization and dehumanization. These systems have produced what Erica Meiners calls the “school to prison ‘nexus,’” a deepening interpenetration of systems of education and incarceration that transforms who counts as a deserving “human” and who must be counted among the undeserving mass of society’s debris.¹ This renewed redistribution of humanity, and the economic and social redistribution it entails, naturalizes the current transformation of systems of mass education into systems of mass incarceration, with civil subjectivity the horizon of political possibility for the elite and entitled few. Here I will explore in particular how college programs in prison relate to institutions of higher education. The aim is to change the questions these systems are designed to answer. Changing the questions asked—rather than modifying the tactics designed to answer them—enables us to see how the longstanding interdependence of prisons and education is repurposed to naturalize the recent transformations of neoliberalism. This is the kind of perspective shift Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls for in her study of California’s new prison economy, which enables us to “see how ‘prison’ is actually in the middle of the muddle that confronts all modestly educated working people and their extended communities—the global supermajority—at the dawn of the twenty-first century.”²

The rise of prisons is often linked to what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls the “disciplinary society.” According to Foucault’s 1975 study Discipline and Punish, Western Europe and its white settler colonies underwent a transformation in the relations between governance, education, and capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.³ These societies allegedly moved from state forms associated with feudalism, elite education, and mercantile capitalism into forms of governance associated with nationalism, mass education, and industrial capitalism. New institutions and systems of social discipline were developed to manage national populations: the school, the army, and the prison. In place of violent punishment (such as public executions and floggings), subjects are indoctrinated into value systems that will “discipline” their behavior. The school does this positively; the prison does this negatively. Together these institutions provide an “education” in proper conduct. As many critics have pointed out, however, Foucault’s genealogy leaves out the modes of racial and colonial discipline and punishment that enabled the emergence and maintenance of such European and white settler civil societies.⁴ These critics clarify how populations who cannot be educated as labor for either colonial expansion or industrial capitalism become the necessary condition for societies to appear liberal, civil, and governable—they become subjects of reform and punishment through which existing distributions of value are rationalized and justified.

Alternative accounts of post-1970s mass incarceration in the US offer a longer genealogy of penal institutions and their linkage to broader systems of human immobilization, capture, and containment; see Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? for one definitive account of this history.⁵ The earliest practices of English imprisonment linked new modes of governance to emergent capitalism, specifically realized in the use of architectural containment to punish poverty (debtor’s prisons), legal mechanisms to translate mobility into criminality (vagrancy as the crime of being without land or labor), and legalized practices of punishment that produced a mobile colonial labor force (through kidnapping, impressment, indenture, and enslavement).⁶ The American colonies were among the first to generate physical structures not only for the express purpose of containing and managing a labor force, but also as a way of ascribing permanent social value, as status, to subjects through practices of confinement and imprisonment.⁷ Chattel slavery is one of the most notorious facets of this system, as it attempted to ascribe permanent social value to humans by making “race” a status category.⁸ The construction of race as status was predicated equally on the exclusion of indigenous peoples from civilized humanity and on legitimating practices of genocide, forced removal, and incarceration that vacillated between “recognizing” independent native sovereignty over delimited territory and “restricting” native sovereignty through geographic containment (the reservation system).⁹ This historical approach situates the birth of the “modern prison” (typically dated to the Antebellum construction of Eastern State Penitentiary and Auburn Prison in the U.S.) in the broader context of colonial, racialized and gendered discipline and punishment. The Antebellum imprisonment of white men imposed “civil death,” or loss of legal rights, as a punishment and incentive for reform.¹⁰ This carceral logic did not work as well for those without legal rights, whose control and punishment would mostly occur beyond the formal prison until later in the nineteenth century.¹¹

This complex relationship between race, gender, and systems of punishment was replicated across systems of education. Formal systems of education, like those of incarceration, apportioned civil life through assignations of race and gender status. Such status-making projects relied on educational practices that tied differential kinship (race as legal descent) to differential education. The denial of literacy to enslaved Africans and African Americans and forced education in the protocols of white supremacy (tied unevenly to Christianization) occurred while enlarged public education for the white population was set in motion. The extension of public education across white populations—as part of the making of “whiteness” as a status achievable by European immigrants—prepared them for liberal citizenship, including acceptance of existing capitalist, racial, and gender relations, while indoctrination into such relations required at times the denial of education and at other times coerced or forced education for those designated nonwhite, such as in the case of the Indian boarding schools and mission houses. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) famously declared “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,” putting an end to legal enslavement on the basis of race even as it instituted legal enslavement as punishment for crime. In combination with the political apportionment clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, this set in motion longstanding struggles over whether or not a “badge of servitude” could be justly imposed by the category of “race” or whether it must be delimited in scope by the category of “crime” (and whether people designated nonwhite could be de facto or de jure branded criminals).¹²

Across the later nineteenth century, legal cases discerning the changing meaning of race as status (Plessy v. Ferguson, the racial prerequisite cases, blood quantum rulings) shaped a nexus of institutional practices using “race” to recalibrate the meaning of crime and vice versa.¹³ From Reconstruction onward, race was used first explicitly and then implicitly to differentiate between populations fit for educational mechanisms (disciplinary and carceral reform) versus punitive ones (denial of educational access and carceral labor).¹⁴ After the Civil War, for example, New York prison reformers Enoch Cobb Wines and Theodore Dwight “advocated making reformation of the offender the primary object of imprisonment, at least where young offenders were concerned,” rather than making industrial profit.¹⁵ Meanwhile, Southern carceral reformers developed the black codes that introduced specific racial penalities for “vagrancy” and ultimately led to the convict lease system, which reproduced conditions of legal slavery for the specific benefit of the state by “renting out a convict to a private company for a specific term.”¹⁶ Gilded Age and Progressive Era experiments with reform and punishment continued to calibrate forced mobilization—orphan trains, child saving operations, Indian boarding schools—against forced immobilization—the growth of women’s prisons, new jails for status-based juvenile crimes, colonial occupation in the Pacific and Caribbean, migrant detention on Angel Island, and so on.

This longer genealogy makes it easier to understand how late-twentieth-century imbrications of education and incarceration emerge from already extant practices of governance. In particular, this nineteenth and early twentieth-century history helps situate the rise and fall of Keynesian economic policies in the shift from Progressivism to the Welfare-Warfare state and then the Workfare-Warfare state.¹⁷ Many critics have linked the late twentieth-century boom in carceral systems (including the construction of new prisons as well as the development of massive infrastructures of policing, detention, and administration) to a broader shift away from the “disciplinary” society described above, which always included violence and disentitlement for many, to the wholesale structural adjustment of social expectations aligned with neoliberalism. According to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this occurred through the mid-century development of “military Keynesianism,” which describes “the centrality of war-making to socioeconomic security,”¹⁸ and then the subsequent dismantling of the state’s responsibility to redistribute the “socioeconomic security” developed through the “Military-Industrial Complex.”¹⁹ The “welfare” function of the Welfare-Warfare state was replaced in the neoliberal era by a “post-Keynesian state-building project” that turns welfare into workfare.²⁰ People who have been de- and re-territorialized throughout the twentieth century to meet the national needs of capital suffer new forms of domestic abandonment as capital is liberated (via trade “deregulation”) and labor is opened globally to uneven geographic exploitation-without-development.²¹

Within the US, this transformation has been linked to the turn to mass incarceration (and dismantling of systems of mass access to education, healthcare, social services, and jobs). The building of prisons for mass incarceration resolved problems associated with surplus populations (warehousing some portions of the surplus population in regions that create jobs and political capital for others), surplus capital (providing sites of investment as well as extraction), and surplus state power.²² To explain this final point, Gilmore argues that since the 1970s “the state built itself by building prisons fashioned from surpluses that the newly developing political economy had not absorbed in other ways.”²³ This neoliberal state derived political power from claiming to shrink the state, specifically its welfare functions, while actually building the state apparatus through anti-immigrant legislation, three-strikes laws, and drug-related mandatory sentencing. This allowed the state to absorb anti-racist social-justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s by creating formally race-neutral (non–white supremacist) policies that nevertheless result in explicitly racist effects, such that prisons incarcerate wildly disproportionate numbers of people of color.²⁴ The racist outcomes of post-1970s policing and detention have often been linked to the economic restructuring of the United States to maximize the flow of transnational capital by sharpening international divisions of labor. They are also central to the reorganization of gender and sexual norms for political and economic purposes, including the elaboration of new penalties for often racialized and class-demarcated gender and sexual transgression.²⁵ As Gilmore summarizes this transformation: “The crisis of state capacity then became, peculiarly, its own solution, as the welfare-warfare state began the transformation, bit by bit, to the permanent crisis workfare-warfare state, whose domestic militarism concretely recapitulated in the landscapes of depopulated urban communities and rural prison towns.”²⁶

The rise of post 1970s mass incarceration is not therefore merely about prisons per se, but more broadly about a transformation in the systems that define and distribute human value, including what precisely humans deserve, and who is accountable to provide this for them; education is one of these systems. In the 1960s and 1970s, radical movements for racial, sexual, and gendered liberation crystallized longstanding struggles over state power, including its function in the redistribution of wealth, its regulation of labor and financial markets, and its commitment to infrastructural support for all. These claims included educational access as part of infrastructural redistribution—affirmative action being the most limited outcome of demands for full equality of educational institutions and entrance into higher education. The 1980s and 1990s might be equally characterized as periods of radical struggles over economic justice, but this time the welfare state itself was the target. Here neoliberal activists (both politically liberal and conservative) sought to shrink the state’s role in redistribution, regulation, and infrastructural guarantees, including a specific attack on public access to higher education. In the turn from race to crime as the logic of disentitlement (and the expansion of crime to include a broad range of practices associated once again with poverty, vagrancy, or kinship), a huge swath of the human population is moved from state-supported education into state-supported incarceration (and the state is reduced to the legal and policy mechanism for corporate rule).²⁷ In so doing, the capacity to sustain self-determined social life-worlds is dramatically impoverished; communities are fractured and relationships frayed by geographies of prison placement and temporalities of doing time. Theorizing more broadly, Dylan Rodríguez suggests that “the prison is less a ‘destination’ point for ‘the duly convicted’ than a point of massive human departure—from civil society, the free world, and the mesh of affective social bonds and relations that produce varieties of ‘human’ family and community.”²⁸

II. Education Justice

Such a “massive human departure” is facilitated in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century by the promise of a “selective human return”: philanthropic efforts help to lift up the most worthy among the disentitled masses. As public entitlements shrink and market-based responses rise, non-profit organizations frequently step in to provide distributive and service functions. What were once grassroots struggles against the welfare state have become through neoliberal pressure part of what Gilmore calls “the shadow of the shadow state,” which “take[s] responsibility for persons who are in the throes of abandonment rather than responsibility for persons progressing toward full incorporation into the body politic.”²⁹ These organizations play a specific role in buffering limited access for the poor or working classes, seeking a combination of public and private funding to offer minimal versions of a social safety net.³⁰ In relation to education, neoliberal activism targets systems of public entitlement to higher education, offering private solutions to raise worthy individuals from their mass problems. Increasingly philanthropic and private efforts are called upon to provide even minimal access to what was once “public” education. This is particularly true for efforts to provide access to higher education within prisons themselves.

Dylan Rodríguez has been among the most forceful critics of what he calls “liberal philanthropic” visions of education programs in prison. In particular, he is critical of the idea that providing access to higher education behind bars is equivalent to either education or social justice. Rodríguez expresses concern that post-1960s higher education programs in prison tend to view themselves as independent from the carceral system itself, providing access to education otherwise denied the large numbers of people living behind bars in the US. Rodríguez asks us to resituate these programs within the specific reorganizations of human value aligned with neoliberalism, however, rather than as antagonistic to it. For Rodríguez, higher education programs in prison designed and offered in the wake of more radical intellectual organizing within the prisons could be seen as part of broader “attempts to absorb and institutionalize the political-intellectual work of imprisoned intellectuals and activists.”³¹ It is of course not fully possible to institutionalize the political and intellectual work of imprisoned peoples, whose thinking and actions cannot be totally constrained by sanctioned educational programming even in deeply coercive conditions. Rodríguez’s point here is that such programs may introduce the illusion of hegemony such that intellectual participation in programming delimits the horizon of political imagination and praxis. Rodríguez suggests that while higher education programs in prisons may have a range of intentions and effects, overall such programs work to “stretch the epistemological and intellectual limits of the state’s capacity to surveil and proctor its captives.”³² Providing access to higher education in prison does not necessarily challenge the project of mass incarceration and the dismantling of mass education in which it is situated.

This critique suggests that education programs in prison can too easily enact neoliberal governance. They institute new partnerships between state institutions (such as the Department of Corrections and public colleges and universities) and seemingly non-state actors (volunteers and non-profits). This structure severely impacts the possibility and meaning of education within the carceral context. Such programs can also extend carceral modes beyond the prison itself in ways that effectively curtail more imaginative and emancipatory educational projects. In her study of what she calls “semicarceral settings,” Lynn Haney works to “conceptualize the linkages that can form across state institutions and to connect the management of conduct in different state spaces.”³³ As part of a neoliberal movement for rehabilitation (“rather than” punishment), many subjects are placed in institutions that understand education as therapeutic and therapy as educational, an important part of rehabilitation and preparation for a return to society. In her study of two “semicarceral settings,” Alliance and Visions, Haney argues that women in particular are remanded to “hybrid” institutions that partner state, non-profit, and private actors.³⁴ Within these complex systems, state authority itself is diffused through new formations of hybrid governmental processes through which “conduct is managed and directed” for all participants in the system, including administrators, teachers, students, and activists.³⁵

Thus the selective return to humanity promised by education programs in prisons seems to constitute new relations between neoliberal subjects of governance as well as new institutions and systems of “humanization” and selective politicization. On the one hand, this system threatens to reduce what Haney calls the “social imaginations” of activists working within carceral education programs.³⁶ Madonna Thunder Hawk points out that entering into funding streams changes activist imagination: “just by trying to keep funding and pay everyone’s salaries, they start to unconsciously limit their imagination of what they could do.”³⁷ On the other hand, this process threatens to replace what Rodríguez calls a more radical “contemporary prison praxis” with “the politically domesticating and delimited nomenclatures of ‘prison writing’ and ‘prison education.’”³⁸ This is what Joy James, in her 2005 collection The New Abolitionists, describes as the limits of “penal slave narratives” which do not always “offer new visions of freedom. Some yearn for emancipation (parole, clemency) but not freedom (liberation from racial, economic, gender repression) and the political agency and risk-taking that could realize it.”³⁹ These critiques point to the problem with providing access to a system—shifting one’s given position within it—rather than demanding justice from it. The latter requires a transformation of its institutions, values, and practices, including those proffering education—from credit-bearing college to vocational gender and sexuality training—as “uplift” from racial and class oppression. As Angela Davis summarizes this problem, “you might say that prison abolition is a way of talking about the pitfalls of the particular version of democracy represented by U.S. capitalism.”⁴⁰

While I agree with the critique of philanthropic efforts enabled by the carceral system, including well-meaning liberal and seemingly radical practices that fall far short of their aims, I do not think this critique requires that we abandon efforts to develop higher education programs inside prisons and to ensure access to college education post-release. It is inevitable that such programs run the risk of exposing students to harm; they are situated within and amidst the harm-inflicting, ontologically and epistemologically violent conditions of incarceration. This is a conflict (or contradiction) intrinsic to such programs, and it is only possible to resolve this conflict/contradiction through prison abolition and broader movements for racial, economic, and education justice. The goal of prison abolition must therefore be intrinsic to the programs themselves. It is also true that education programs in prison, however well intentioned, run the risk of replicating the most restrictive forms of public education instituted in the service of neoliberal governmentalization. But in our current political climate, so do many education programs outside the walls of the prison. In particular, many higher education programs run the risk of being complicit in broader efforts to undermine access to public education as part of what Haney calls “the contemporary politics of disentitlement” attending neoliberal restructuring of economic, social, and human value.⁴¹

This seems particularly true as I write and revise this essay, while state universities across the country are under attack for everything from unionization and teacher salaries to offering ethnic studies and humanities curricula. Accusations of bureaucratic inefficiency and failure to adapt to neoliberal markets for labor and capital are part of a broader attack on public funding for “inefficient” or low value knowledge. According to Bill Gates in his 2011 speech to the National Governors Association:

Now in the past, it felt fine to just say, ok, we’re overall going to be generous to this sector. But in this era, to break down and really say what are the categories that help fill jobs and drive the state economy in the future, you’ll find that it’s not across the board in terms of everything that the state subsidizes in higher education.⁴²

Here we see a shift in the meaning of “public” education away from community-based demands for state redistributive mechanisms and into market-based delivery systems in the service of capital.⁴³ In an era when high-interest-bearing private student loans allow debt-based access to higher education, especially for the dwindling middle classes, we are seeing the financialization of education for the benefit of the very philanthropists who will later refinance it.

Here I wish to explore higher education programs in prison not as an answer, but as a terrain of critical and tactical struggle among various academics and activists, precisely over the conditions of “access to higher education” as an education justice issue. If college programs in prison might restrict and govern the critical imagination of both students and teachers, so too might “free-world” college and university programs in which curricular and pedagogical sovereignty against “the market” and “the state” have always been in tension with curricular and pedagogical accountability to “the community.” In effect, our current moment exposes how higher education has long been a site of struggle between state, market, and community-based activists, a struggle over and at times against the will of academics who sometimes see themselves as institutionally apart and protected from such struggles.⁴⁴ Universities have played a key role in the transformation of social knowledge and economic distribution during the neoliberal era. We should not yield our claim upon the college and university system as a domain of public institutions for intellectual expansion and education justice.

1. Erica R. Meiners, The Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2007). [↩]
2. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 11. [↩]
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1979). [↩]
4. For a direct critique, see Joy James, “Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence” in Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 24–43. [↩]
5. See Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003). [↩]
6. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). [↩]
7. Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). [↩]
8. Dennis Childs calls this the “Middle Passage carceral model”; Childs, “‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’: Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix,” American Quarterly 61.2 (2009): 271–297. For historical background, see Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). [↩]
9. Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). [↩]
10. See Caleb Smith, “Civil Death and Carceral Life” from The Prison & the American Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 27-52. [↩]
11. See Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). [↩]
12. Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). On Fourteenth Amendment applications to race and corporations, see Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). [↩]
13. Plessy v. Ferguson is the 1896 Supreme Court case upholding a Louisiana law mandating racial segregation; “racial prerequisite cases” is Ian Haney Lopez’s term for the group of cases from In re Ah Yup (1878) through Ex parte Mohriez (1944) determining that people of Arab, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and South Asian descent are not “white” by law; blood quantum laws are US legislation defining membership in American Indian tribes by degree of ancestry. Current efforts to label “undocumented” persons “illegal” replicate these debates. See Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). [↩]
14. For an historical overview of educational efforts in US prisons, see Megan Sweeney, “Tell Me What You Read; I’ll Tell You What You Are: Reading and Education in U.S. Penal History,” Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). [↩]
15. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 177. [↩]
16. Ibid., 181. [↩]
17. For recent historical studies, see Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). [↩]
18. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 25. [↩]
19. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation” (January 17, 1961). This concept was developed in Angela Davis’s 1997 speech “The Prison Industrial Complex,” published in Colorlines (Fall 1998). [↩]
20. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 53. [↩]
21. What Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” has been practiced throughout colonial history and is a key feature of the exploitation of indigenous peoples and of migrant labor (including earlier legalization such as the Bracero Program). This recent phase dismantles white civil entitlements to national protection of labor through tariffs and unions. [↩]
22. The federal political and policy development of mass incarceration is discussed in Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); and Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2007). [↩]
23. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 54. [↩]
24. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: the New Press, 2010); Joy James, ed. States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). [↩]
25. On mobilizations against this restructuring, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Grace Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). [↩]
26. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 86. [↩]
27. This too is changing as privatized prisons and detention centers replace state institutions. Decarceration risks in this context merely replacing state-based imprisonment with for-profit detention and administration. Recent coalitions to reduce reliance on prisons include conservative politicians advancing fiscal efficiency arguments. See Right on Crime at http://www.rightoncrime.com/. [↩]
28. Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 227. [↩]
29. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in INCITE!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 45. Reprinted in this issue. [↩]
30. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded historicizes philanthropy as the result of massive disinvestment in governmental and state processes of redistribution and the rise of the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” (NPIC) from the early 1900s to the present. See in particular Christine E. Ahn, “Democratizing American Philanthropy,” The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. [↩]
31. Rodríguez, Forced Passages, 93. [↩]
32. Rodríguez, Forced Passages, 89. Because such programs partner with the Department of Corrections, Rodríguez suggests that they run the risk of diverting prisoner-centered intellectual organizing into acceptable regimes of intellectual reform. In its worst case scenarios: “the conflicted incorporation of prison education into the functioning of the regime has actually enabled the criminalization and liquidation of more organic political education networks among imprisoned activists and radical intellectuals” (102). [↩]
33. Lynn A. Haney, Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010), 15, 8. [↩]
34. Haney, Offending Women, 17. [↩]
35. Ibid., 18. [↩]
36. Ibid., 211. [↩]
37. “Native Organizing before the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in INCITE!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 105. [↩]
38. Rodríguez, Forced Passages, 80. [↩]
39. Joy James, ed. The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), xxiii. [↩]
40. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 72. [↩]
41. Haney, Offending Women, 212. [↩]
42. Bill Gates, “Do’s and Don’ts for Higher Education Improvement,” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, uploaded by Gates Foundation (March 1, 2011). The Gates Foundation is a key participant in the Vera Institute of Justice “Pathways Project,” a five-year pilot that supports state investment in cross-sectoral partnerships to provide higher education two years prior to and after release from prison; one of its four stated goals is to “demonstrate that there are cost-effective methods for providing access to postsecondary education and support services for currently and formerly incarcerated individuals.” See http://www.vera.org/project/pathways-prison-postsecondary-education-project. [↩]
43. As in the case of labor and capital, education is globally de-territorialized as elite out-of-state and international students pay increasingly high fees to attend US public universities (while in-state residents face diminished access) and US universities create distance-learning and international campuses largely unknown to their domestic faculty. See Eng-Beng Lim, “Performing the Global University” Social Text 27.4 101 (2009): 25–44. [↩]
44. See Chris Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University 1880–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Rod Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). [↩]