My Prison Academia: A Comparative Curriculum Analysis of US Canadian Prison Post-secondary Education (PPSE) Programs Inside-out Walls to Bridges

As the prison-industrial complex in the US and Canada continues expanding (Davis & Roswell, 2013), prison abolitionists continue to find covert, novel pathways to make “non-reformist reforms” (Wilson-Gilmore, 2012) or transformational changes within intuitions and occasionally super-structures. A more recent, compulsory way in which educators in the United States of America (US) and Canada began this shift is through prison post-secondary education programs (PPSE’s). Before the time of COVID-19, discourse about inside folks being released en masse in the US and Canada (Gostin, Friedman, Wetter, 2020; R v. TK, 2020) would have been deemed as farfetched; consider that 800 million jobs will be lost worldwide (BBC, 2017) due to automation displacement. This dialectical antagonism between workers and the state is one of many aspects of which we can shape the discourse and create a counter-narrative shifting towards an abolitionist framework (Davis, 2005, Wilson-Gilmore, 2012, Kaba, 2013, Roberts, 2019). This can be done by ensuring that prison post-secondary education program curriculums are undergirded with an anti-war/anti-imperial, abolitionist (ibid) and queer of color lens (Ferguson, 2006). For the purpose of this non-probability, exploratory, comparative, convenience research design, this paper will use a curriculum analysis to explore whether PPSE’s in the U.S. and Canada – primarily Inside-Out Prison Exchange and Walls to Bridges Prison Collective – incorporate an abolitionist or queer of color lens.With American and Canadian PPSE’s, the prison immersion training both outside and inside of the carceral space with the inside prison think-tank (Inside-Out) and the inside prison collective (Walls to Bridges) serve as spaces where facilitators are trained. Training inside of the carceral space was crucial to undertaking this work. Using a historical materialist and radical queer lens, this research will look at the pedagogical and andragogic praxis’ that prison instructors learn in the carceral space; this research will also give an unbiased explanation of how Walls to Bridges, former “Inside-Out: Canada” evolved from Inside-Out Prison Exchange. This research will also compare and contrast the pedagogical and andragogic praxis when inside the carceral space. Limitations of this study are also explored given the current historical moment. Recommendations will direct how this study will build upon future research design(s), as well as inform how this dissertation-in-practice’s final product is scaffolded. Data analysis from the dissertation-in-practice will inform the final product, which will be an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) prison post-secondary education curriculum for US and Canadian students interested in pre-prison immersion to be rooted in an abolitionist praxis.

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