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Letters On Pragmatic Hope

Don’t Blindly Support College in Prison Program

Written by

dkeller

As you may already know, on Monday the Educational Policy Committee unanimously approved the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education’s proposal to begin a 2-year pilot program this fall. The upcoming faculty vote on Wednesday, May 6 is the final step of the approval process. I am writing this Wespeak because while I share many of the concerns held by those who oppose the College in Prison program based on an abolitionist critique (that such reform further legitimizes prisons instead of challenging them as fundamentally inhumane), I do NOT feel that such ideological apprehensions fully negate the beneficial qualities of the program (that prisoners will receive real, hard Wesleyan credit for Wesleyan courses taken behind bars). I urge you to resist the idea that we must choose only between blind support and full dismissal of the proposal.

I believe that the campus should be as engaged as possible with the program. We must make spaces for open dialogues about what this program might mean for those involved on all levels (not just those directly participating), and we must not shy away from asking how we are all implicated in institutionally racist systems (in this case, Academia and the criminal justice system). I do not ask that your support for the College in Prison program at Wesleyan be unquestioning, but rather that our critical examinations inform how the program is implemented from here on out. College in Prison should not be understood as an end unto itself but rather as one tiny part of the daunting task that we as a society have before us: to envision and create a world that does not use prisons and state violence to enforce societal values under the guise of alleged public safety. As Angela Davis notes, “Challenges to the myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners’ human rights [can] be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.” [1]

[1] Davis, Angela Y and Rodriguez, Dylan. “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation.” Social Justice; Fall 2000, Vol. 27 Issue 3, p 212, 7 p

Comments

2 responses to “Don’t Blindly Support College in Prison Program”

  1. David Lott, '65 Avatar
    David Lott, ’65

    Prisons may seem fundamentally inhumane from some perspectives, especially that of the prisoner. Then again, crimes seem pretty inhumane from the perspective of the victims. About 60% of the men in prison in this country have committed one or more violent crime. A large percentage of the remainder are jailed for theft in one form of another, often involving weapons with their threat of and potential for violence.

    Let’s stipulate that much can and should be done to improve both prisons and the court system. The problem with the “abolitionist” critique is that it so greatly trivializes the crimes that it marginalizes the valid criticisms of the prison system.

    The statement that prisons enforce societal values under the guise of “alleged public safety” is hopelessly glib. Public safety is a fundamental societal value, and the enforcement of this value by imprisonment of persons who commit violence is completely rational.

    I would very much like to see reduction in imprisonment for non violent crime. But a utopian and wrongheaded movement to abolish prison based on a racial critique isn’t going to get us to that goal.

    Reply
  2. antiabolitionist Avatar
    antiabolitionist

    interesting that the author quotes angela davis, perhaps the most prominent of this nation’s prison “abolitionists.” Davis has earned millions of dollars in speaking fees delivering blistering critiques of capitalist inequity, especially that perpetuted via the “prison industrial complex.” davis fervently supported criminal demagogues like george jackson, who was responsible for the horrific slaughter of several prison guards and trustees at san quentin on 08/21/71 before he was himself gunned down, and ruchell magee, who participated in the so-called August 7th “revolt” in which a Marin County judge had his head blown off by a shotgun blast during a prisoner escape attempt. she also spoke in defense of the so-called “san quentin six,” a group of prisoners who participated in jackson’s bloody rampage. finally, for all her pronouncements about democracy, davis unceasingly lauded such unfettered police states as the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia until the peoples of those nations rose up and cast their repressive governments into the dustbin of history.

    Reply

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