Beyond Incarceration: Imagining a World Without Prisons

Just how radical is it to think of a world without prisons? What might it take to get there? For many years prisons have seemed to be an absolutely central part of any modern state, as unquestionable as hospitals. As Angela Davis states in Are Prisons Obsolete, "The prison is considered so 'natural' that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it." At the same time, prisons are not working. By every measure, crime rates, cost effectiveness, recidivism and rehabilitation, they are a failure. How we might get to something different is where our collective imagination has so long failed too. Yet in recent years, more than just imagining life without prisons, many racial and social justice movements are taking steps towards making that life a reality. This class will take a deep dive into the promise and the process of prison abolition as a global movement. On the way we will examine key questions in criminology, political organization, psychology, ethics, and racial justice. Over 8 weeks we will learn the often surprising and remarkably recent history of prisons; make a global survey of the role of prisons in society; examine contemporary movements towards decriminalization and deinstitutionalization; and experiment with some of the practices which abolitionist organizations have developed to try and make a prison-free-future reality. This class is for anyone interested in racial justice, criminology and criminal justice, or contemporary social movements. This course can only be taken for 3 or 5 units. PLEASE DO NOT ENROLL FOR 4 UNITS