Prison Abolition

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course introduces students to the long history of the prison in the American experience, and does so by engaging ideas, movements, and practices to craft worlds of care and mutuality beyond the harms that the prison produces and legitimates. Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, the course engages with the full range of “carceral geographies” in which social life is penetrated with the state’s power to surveil, arrest, judge, and punish its citizens; as well as the “abolition geographies” that, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms, combine resources, creativity, and commitment to create freedom as a place where all life/lives are precious.