Introduction: The Prison Issue

Abstract

The Prison Issue might be understood as raising—and providing a variety of (sometimes conflicting) answers to—an urgent series of questions: how does attention to the booming punishment industry force us to rethink our understanding of the contours and contexts of the crisis in higher education? higher education: for whom and what for? what can academic disciplines, organizations, and institutions do to end their complicity with the expansion of the prison-industrial complex? can colleges and universities be transformed to become engines of social change rather than social reproduction? how, and to what ends?