We Used to Think, But Now We Know: Abolitionist Pedagogy

Abstract

This article reprints a lightly edited paper by Zoe Hammer, which she presented as part of a panel of scholar-activists and long-time prison abolitionists at the American Studies Association in November 2014. In a brief introduction to the paper, Hammer reflects on how, in 2014, the framing of torture in prison by both prison officials and prison reformers obscured the systemic violence of prison under the guise of what James Kilgore calls “carceral humanism,” thus emphasizing the importance of the analysis and framing as abolitionists. The article contextualizes this 2014 moment of reformist versus abolitionist frameworks, particularly through the author’s lens of many years of teaching college courses about the prison industrial complex and abolition.