Introduction to Special Issue: Abolitionist Praxis and Education Across Prison Walls

Abstract

This issue of Voices in Urban Education explores the complex and often contradictory terrain of abolitionist practice within and beyond college-in-prison programs. To do so, we draw on the foundational belief that education can be a practice of freedom. Across the contributions and artwork presented in this issue, we invite readers to examine and witness how teaching and learning across prison walls has historically been and continues to be a site of political struggle, solidarity, and collective transformation. We also invite readers to consider urgent questions that arise as education institutions expand their presence within prisons, including those that ask: can education behind bars support liberatory aims, or does it risk reinforcing the prison-industrial complex? And if so, how do we make this liberatory function intentional and hold ourselves as educators accountable to the unintended negative consequences that may arise from our well-meaning endeavors? Through reflections, case studies, and dialogues, contributors to this issue grapple with these tensions, highlighting both the possibilities and limits of working toward abolition from within carceral systems. From campus organizing against policing to building a bridge for incarcerated students onto college campuses, the issue surfaces abolition as both a political commitment and an ongoing pedagogical practice. Centering the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students, educators, and organizers, this issue insists on education as a radical act of presence, imagination, and solidarity—even, and especially, in carceral spaces. The editors would like to express their deep appreciation to all of the contributors to this special issue, the entire NYU Prison Education Program team, the VUE editor in chief Maria Rosa Brea, Toby Wu, and especially to Maddie Coury for her invaluable editorial assistance.