Tackling the PIC: Successes and Challenges in Teaching the Prison-Industrial Complex

Abstract

“But they’re criminals. We should lock them up and throw away the key!” my student, using a tired refrain, declared. She soon had a classroom of her peers— thoughtful, engaged students who often enjoyed analyzing complicated and difficult social issues—nodding in support. Thus began my entry into teaching and discussing the prison industrial complex (PIC) and abolitionism in a college classroom. Luckily, the class moved beyond this knee-jerk reaction, but I learned a valuable lesson that day. While I regularly engage students in thinking critically about poverty, social justice, race relations, feminism, and inclusion, exploring the possibilities of abolishing a system of criminalization and imprisonment that seemed so natural and commonplace to them was going to be a new challenge. To that end, this essay will explore my experiences teaching the PIC in two differently situated classes in order to address what worked well and what did not. As a historian who teaches in women, gender, and sexuality studies, my two very different experiences were driven in large part by how I organized and structured the students’ entrance to and evaluation of this topic. Since I experienced some real success when I taught the PIC the second time around (but not the first), the essay includes some “best practices” to consider when approaching this topic with students who are, at best, uninformed and, at worst, completely resistant to the idea of even recognizing the PIC, much less considering its abolishment. This essay explores the frameworks in which my teaching of the PIC did and did not work for me in the classroom, including the texts I used, questions we discussed, and assignments that my students and I found most useful. It also examines what kinds of arguments I found to be most compelling in the classroom around the possibilities for abolishing the PIC and what can happen when the prospect of abolition is raised. I also explore how to link the PIC with historical antecedents in order to build an effective groundwork for discussing the PIC, since it has been through this historically-situated framework that I have found the most success and reward in engaging students in the idea of abolition as the solution to the PIC. I also discuss ways to incorporate PIC discussions into other material that intersects with it. I begin by focusing on why I teach the PIC and why my experiences discussing it and prodding students to consider radical acts of resistance have only strengthened my dedication to having these difficult dialogues.