Higher Education and the Carceral State

Higher Education and the Carceral State: Transforming Together explores the diversity of ways in which university faculty and students are intervening in the system of mass incarceration through the development of transformative arts and educational programs for students in correctional institutions. Demonstrating the ways that higher education can intervene in and disrupt the deeply traumatic experience of incarceration and shift the embedded social-emotional cycles that lead to recidivism, this book is both inspiration and guide for those seeking to create and sustain programs as well as to educate students about the types of programs universities bring to prisons. From arts workshops and educational courses to degree-granting programs, individuals and communities across multiple disciplines in higher education are actively breaking the cycle of shame and division in mass incarceration through direct engagement. This book explores the inspiring, innovative, and changemaking initiatives in carceral spaces - from arts workshops and educational courses to degree granting programs - through the lens of faculty, artists, scholars, students, and administrators. Readers will learn the diverse ways in which these interventions and partnerships can take shape and the life changing impacts that they have on all those involved, in particular students who are incarcerated. The book includes authors with lived experience of incarceration throughout. Section I highlights the voices of students who are currently or formerly incarcerated, while Section II addresses diverse collaborations through and across systems of corrections and education. Section III features the voices of teaching artists, while Section IV includes those that start and lead these programs, offering roadmaps for others interested in engaging in this transformative work.

Annie Buckley is the founder and director of Prison Arts Collective, an internationally recognized statewide Arts in Corrections program that has brought multidisciplinary arts classes and arts facilitator trainings to over 7,000 participants in 16 state prisons across California since 2013. In addition, she is the founding director of VISTA (Valuing Incarcerated Scholars through Academia), a new BA degree-granting program at San Diego State University, where she is also a professor and associate dean. Buckley is an artist, curator, and widely published author whose work has appeared in leading international contemporary art publications, including Artforum, Art in America, the Huffington Post, and she is an editor at large with the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she also wrote the series, "Art Inside" about facilitating arts programming in correctional settings.

Foreword Introduction Section One: Voices of Students 1. Schedule Conflict 2. Transformation and Redemption: A Personal Narrative from a Position of Lived Experience 3. The Freedom and Captivity Curriculum Project 4. Transforming Lives through Prison Higher Education 5. Humanizing the Numbers: A Photographic Collaboration Section Two: Collaborating in and through the System 6. Scaling walls: Dismantling Asymmetries through Empowering Song 7. Disappearing Acts" and Education as the Practice of Freedom: Feminist Pedagogy in Carceral Spaces 8. The Brutal Stories that Connect Us 9. Matters of Life and Death: Art, Education, and Activism on Death Row 10. An Achingly Realized Sunset: The Importance of Prison Creative Writing 11. Transcommunal Peace, Cooperation, and Respect for Diversity: A University/Prison Multi-Partnership Approach Section Three: Voices of Teaching Artists and Scholars 12. Writing About Art 13. Beyond This Door: Photographic Vision and Carceral Experience 14. Why French: Fear and Freedom in Stepping Outside Our Languages 15. Pushing Back/Pushing Forward: Embracing the Margins to Build Non-Punitive Learning Environments in Canadian Correctional Facilities 16. Excursion and Return: Exploring Transformative Texts, Great Questions, and the Human Experience in the Prison Classroom Section Four: Changemaking and Coalition Building 17. The Poem. The Painting. Us. 18. Building Bridges through Prison-University Partnerships 19. Research within Correctional Arts and Education 20. Reimagining Our Futures: The Beginning, Middle and End of the Digital Higher Education Journey for Incarcerated Learners 21. Structuring the Conduit: Expanding Prison-University Partnerships Through the Readers' Circle 22. An Octopus in the Scaffolding: Ten Years with Prison Arts Collective