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Fighting the Prison-Industrial Complex: A Call toCommunication and Cultural Studies Scholars toChange the WorldPcare

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007To cite this Article: Pcare (2007) 'Fighting the Prison-Industrial Complex: A Call toCommunication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World ',Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4:4, 402 - 420To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14791420701632956URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420701632956

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Fighting the Prison Á IndustrialComplex: A Call to Communicationand Cultural Studies Scholars toChange the WorldPCARE1

Collectively authored by the members of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education (PCARE), an NCA-based group of scholars and activists, this essay argues that the prison Á industrial complex has grown into a dire threat to the practices of US democracy. The essay ‘‘maps’’ the crises spawned by the prison Á industrial complex and then offers a comprehensive action plan for pursuing new forms of scholarship, pedagogy,and activism. The essay therefore hopes to launch nothing less than a revolution in

communication and cultural studies scholarship and a new wave of peace-and-justice activism.

Keywords: Prison Á Industrial Complex; Social Justice; Communication Activism;Liberatory Pedagogy; Prison Abolition

The prison population in the United States exploded from 200,000 people in the early 1970s to more than two million in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Thistenfold rise in the incarceration rate prompted Elliott Currie to argue that

incarceration has become ‘‘the most thoroughly implemented government socialprogram in our time.’’ 2 As communication and cultural studies scholars, we aredistressed that this unprecedented expansion of the US prison system has taken placewith little public discussion and scholarly analysis. As Angela Davis points out, thirty years ago the US government could not have ‘‘lock[ed] up so many people withoutproducing powerful public resistance.’’ 3 We wonder, then, how have we come toaccept the imprisonment of more than two million of our neighbors with so littleresistance and discussion?

Correspondence to: Stephen Hartnett, University of Illinois, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail:[email protected]

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2007 National Communication AssociationDOI: 10.1080/14791420701632956

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies Vol. 4, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 402 Á 420



As communication and cultural studies scholars, we are particularly attentive *though no less subject * to the silences that envelope prison issues in the UnitedStates. These silences are caused by the routine denial of access to journalists toinvestigate prisons, by the difficulties that many of us face when we try to teach inprisons, and by the lack of institutional support for and recognition of prisonscholarship and education. Trying to break through these silences, this article strivesto compel public debate, teaching, and communication and cultural studies researchabout the prison Á industrial complex. We are interested in mapping the scope of theproblem, documenting what we know works in terms of addressing this pressingissue, and establishing research, action, and education agendas for our future work.We are thus calling upon our colleagues to reconsider what they research, how they do it, who they do it for, and who they do it with. This article therefore envisionsnothing less than a revolution in how communication and cultural studies scholars

perceive their relationship to the prison Á industrial complex, the people itincarcerates, and the nation it supposedly protects. In short, we are calling uponour colleagues to help us change the world.

Mapping the Prison ÁIndustrial Complex

In his presidential Farewell Address, delivered on 17 January 1961, President DwightEisenhower warned that the Cold War was enabling weapons producers, warplanners, scientific experts, and policy insiders to form a dangerous alliance of convenience. Driven by mutually enriching self-interests cloaked by the heroicrhetoric of fighting communism, Eisenhower worried that this new formation of political power could become so enormous that it might destroy democracy:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry isnew in the American experience. The total influence * economic, political, evenspiritual * is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federalgovernment. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against theacquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by themilitary Á industrial complex. . . . We must never let the weight of this combinationendanger our liberties or democratic processes. . . . Only an alert and knowledge-able citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machine of defense with our peaceful methods and goals. 4

The fact that Eisenhower saw the ‘‘total influence’’ of the military Á industrial complex reaching ‘‘spiritual’’ dimensions should alert us to how powerful it had become by 1961. Indeed, Eisenhower realized that an alarming number of facets of American lifehad become colonized by the military Á industrial complex, an organizational andrhetorical behemoth capable of undermining democracy. 5

Appropriating Eisenhower’s 1961 warning for contemporary purposes, critics of theUS prison system have begun to refer to it as a prison Á industrial complex. Considerthe fact that the average cost for incarcerating a prisoner is $22,650 per year, with somesuper-max prisons costing close to $40,000 per prisoner per year; expenditures tomaintain state corrections alone ballooned from $15.6 billion in 1986 to over $38.2

Fighting the Prison Á Industrial Complex 403



billion in 2003. Moreover, from the lawyers who make their living trying the cases thatstock our prisons, to the guards who make their lives working in them, to thecorporations that reap massive profits by supplying prisons with food and clothing,making the weapons police forces use, and building the prisons themselves, a wideswathe of US economic life has become entwined with the drive to incarcerate. 6 Thus,much as Eisenhower warned of the military Á industrial complex, the economic,political and spiritual influence of the prison Á industrial complex is now ‘‘felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.’’ As Eisenhower alsowarned, ‘‘Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing’’of the policing industry and prison system with our democratic processes. PCARE’sgoal is to facilitate this ‘‘proper meshing,’’ first by thinking about how the prison Á industrial complex threatens some of the foundational principles of US democracy and then by working toward practical solutions to the crisis. 7

We begin with the argument that the US has become an incarceration nation thatranks first in the world for the percentage of our citizens behind bars (714 per100,000). Counting prisoners and the more than 5 million parolees and probationers,the prison system controls the lives of over 7.2 million Americans. This means that1 out of every 32 adults * and 1 in 3 black males * will be incarcerated in some formduring their lifetime. 8 Considering that each prisoner or parolee’s hardships areshared by their family members, we can postulate that as many as 25 millionAmericans are touched directly by the prison Á industrial complex. Moreover, theubiquity of mass-mediated representations of crime and criminals means that the

consciousness of the nation is flooded with images provided by and usually supporting the policies of the prison Á industrial complex. We are thus becoming ademocracy underwritten by prisons, an incarceration nation .

Understanding the many ways the prison Á industrial complex has reshaped ourpublic discourse, penal policy, economic interests, and democratic practices willrequire efforts from the full range of communication and cultural studies scholars.For the prison Á industrial complex threatens our nation by disrupting families,decreasing educational resources, increasing risks of infectious diseases, and fueling afailed war on drugs, hence perpetuating irrational responses to crime and the myriadinjustices arising from the intersections of race, class, and gender. Like the military Á industrial complex, then, we argue that the prison Á industrial complex has become asprawling behemoth threatening the health of democracy in America. To help usreverse this catastrophe, we call upon scholars of interpersonal communication,health communication, rhetorical criticism, family communication, political com-munication, organizational communication, media studies, and cultural studies morebroadly to help us critique and eventually abolish the prison Á industrial complex.

To illustrate why attending to the prison Á industrial complex is both a pressinghistorical obligation and a research imperative for communication and culturalstudies scholars, we offer below an admittedly partial discussion of how the USprison system produces and reproduces power differentials based on race, class, andgender. Indeed, it is not possible to talk about the prison Á industrial complex in the

404 PCARE



United States * let alone work to abolish it * without also addressing the persistentand insidious effects of deeply rooted race-, class-, and gender-based discrimination.

The Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender in the Prison

ÁIndustrial Complex

Rooted in deep historical patterns tracing all the way back to slavery, the prison Á industrial complex produces and reproduces many of our nation’s most egregiousnarratives and practices regarding racial discrimination. 9 For example, people of color, particularly juveniles, are more likely to be stopped by police, placed in juvenilefacilities, and ultimately imprisoned than white defendants who commit the same crime . Moreover, while African Americans constitute 13 percent of the nation’spopulation, they comprise almost half of those imprisoned for nonviolent offences.These disparities are so ingrained that the prison Á industrial complex functions as amachine of racial injustice, as an interlocking series of institutions and practices thatfuel racism in America. 10

Racial discrimination is generally entwined with class discrimination in theprison Á industrial complex. For example, because many poor people of color are notable to afford a lawyer, they are represented by public defenders, who areoverburdened with cases and under-funded when compared with prosecutors *these conditions dramatically increase the chances of conviction. 11 The sentencingprocess is also skewed by class and racial factors. For example, the disparatesentencing standards for crack and cocaine result in higher imprisonment rates forAfrican Americans because crack, which is more heavily consumed in poor African

American communities, receives a higher mandatory minimum sentence thancocaine, which is generally consumed in affluent white communities. 12 The very mechanics of justice, then, ranging from access to legal representation to sentencingguidelines, point toward systemic race- and class-based discrimination.

The prison Á industrial complex also reproduces racism once people have enteredits walls, for the average prison sentence for an African American is six months longerthan that for a white person convicted of the same crime. 13 Additionally, whereas 75percent of the people the US Government attempts to execute are black or Latino, anindividual convicted of murdering a white victim is more likely to be sentenced to

death than if their victim was a person of color. This sentencing pattern makes a boldstatement about whose lives are valuable. Indeed, the death penalty is both a macabreexemplification of racial disparities in sentencing and a producer of racism via itssystematic imposition of the harshest punishment on ethnic minorities. 14 Playing atoxic role in legal defense, sentencing guidelines, arrest patterns, drug laws, andcapital cases, racism permeates the prison Á industrial complex.

We should note that the prison Á industrial complex’s toxic effects on democracy are also tied directly to the electoral process, for an estimated 4.7 million Americanshave lost the right to vote because of laws that disenfranchise the imprisoned or theformerly imprisoned. In 48 states, prisoners cannot vote; 36 states bar those on paroleor probation from voting. As a result, in 1998 as many as 1.5 million AfricanAmerican males were denied the right to vote; that number has surely grown since




then. Seen in this light, the prison Á industrial complex reproduces the worst electoraldiscrimination of Jim Crow-era racism. 15

We do not have the space here to engage in a full analysis of race, class, and theprison Á industrial complex, but hope that our preliminary comments spur ourcolleagues to tackle this topic in future scholarship. Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s analysisof how Republicans marshaled racial stereotypes about drugs, crime, and violence inthe 1988 presidential campaign provides a model of how communication scholarscan address the ways the prison Á industrial complex shapes our political choices.Mixing frame-by-frame visual analysis of political ads and television news storiesdepicting Willie Horton with rhetorical analyses of stump speeches, newspaperarticles, and feedback gathered from voters in focus groups, Jamieson demonstrateshow citizens were overwhelmed with a ‘‘broad chain of associations,’’ many of themsaturated with images and narratives steeped in racial stereotypes. Jamieson thus

demonstrates how racism and fear of crime were combined in a media barrage thattorpedoed Dukakis by charging that he was soft on crime. 16 We are hopeful that morecommunication scholars will build upon her work to begin asking: What historicalnarratives sustain these ‘‘chain[s] of association? What images justify the prison Á industrial complex’s practices regarding race? What communicative strategies makethe prison Á industrial complex’s production of racism acceptable to our neighborsand useful for politicians? These are communication problems because as the publicgrows accustomed to seeing poor young blacks and Latinos as Dangerous Others, sothey become accustomed to accepting the consequences of the prison Á industrialcomplex as a legitimate, even necessary, response to supposedly rampaging youngcriminals.

This appearance of legitimacy is particularly entrenched at the intersections of raceand gender, for as Beatrix Campbell argues, crime and fear of crime are ‘‘unthinkableoutside the imperatives of gender.’’ The imperatives of gender are, however,historically flexible, for women in the US have been portrayed as the virginal victimsof ravenous men, as over-sexed temptresses who deserve their fate, as monstrousmurderers, and sometimes as combinations of some or all of these subjectpositions. 17 Moreover, women are proportionally the fastest growing prisonpopulation in the United States: since 1995 the annual rate of growth in the number

of women in prisons or in jails has averaged 5 percent, considerably higher than the3.3 percent yearly average increase for men. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reportsthat ‘‘Black females (with a prison and jail rate of 359 per 100,000) were 2½ timesmore likely than Hispanic females (143 per 100,000) and nearly 4½ times more likely than white females (81 per 100,000) to be incarcerated in 2004.’’ 18 We suspect that thesilence regarding rising incarceration rates among women, and especially black women, is at least partly attributable to the uneasy fit between dominant discoursesabout fear of crime and the social realities of criminal justice policies andincarceration. That is, because the news media are not able to transform poorwomen into a threatening or enticing population, they ignore them, as well as theeffects of incarceration on women’s families and their communities. We accordingly call upon our colleagues in communication and cultural studies to address how the

406 PCARE



combination of racialized and gendered stereotypes and subject positions both fueland are fueled by the prison Á industrial complex.

Three Strategies for Fighting the Prison

ÁIndustrial Complex

Having offered a map of some of the failures of the prison Á industrial complex, we now explore three strategies that we hope will help create an upsurge of activism, research,and teaching about crime and punishment among communication and culturalstudies faculty, with the ultimate goal of empowering prisoners and politicizingteachers and students. Toward that end, we propose a three-pronged strategy forcommunication activists, scholars, and educators that hopes to: (1) change mediaaccess to prisons and media representations about them; (2) trigger a new wave of cultural analyses that challenge the assumptions underwriting our age of massive

incarceration; and (3) expand on successful pedagogical strategies offered both insideand outside of prisons. (Please note that we augment these strategies with resourcesand specific calls to action in the Appendix.)

The New Realism: Debunking the Spectacle via Communication Activism

We are so saturated with images of crime and criminality that incarceration hasbecome a routine part of our daily consumerist practices and political assumptions, yet actual prisons and prisoners remain virtually invisible in television news andentertainment. Contemporary US popular culture has thus become a spectacularcarousel of fantasies about crime and criminals, meaning that the prison Á industrialcomplex has become the stuff of our escapist frivolities and our political conscious-ness. As Sasha Abramsky explains,

We have come to regard arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment as fundamentalprops of our mass culture, thus elevating one of the more unpleasant duties andobligations of the civil society * the prosecution and punishment of those whoflout its laws * into a cultural commodity that may, ultimately, come to definewhat kind of a nation, what kind of a people, we become. 19

But while the prison Á industrial complex churns out an infinite number of offeringsfor the society of the spectacle, so prisoners’ lives, the conditions of prisons, the fateof prisoners’ families, and the actual workings of the prison Á industrial complex remain largely invisible. Surely defining ‘‘what kind of nation’’ we want to becomeshould not be left in the hands of entertainment corporations; surely our nationaldialogue about crime and imprisonment should be more democratic and lesscommodified, more civil and less spectacular.

In The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord argued that as commodity cultureachieves maturity, reaching a point where stunning amounts of our time and energy revolve around the consumption of signs and goods, so we reach an historical stage of

‘‘limitless artificiality’’ based upon the ‘‘falsification of life.’’ Debord argued that thesociety of the spectacle functions not only as a giant mechanism for producing




political assent and endless consumption, but also as a distraction of monumentalproportions. Hence, the society of the spectacle obscures the ‘‘permanent violence’’of political power, thus making the crushing oppression and brutality of state andcorporate control less visible. What better example of Debord’s theory than theprison Á industrial complex’s relation to popular culture? 20

Because the members of PCARE believe that such mass-mediated hallucinationslead to distortions in public opinion and public policy, we argue that activists mustfight for media reform alongside penal reform. Toward that end, we can think of nomore pressing task than to address the appalling restrictions on journalists’ abilitiesto report on prisons and prisoners’ experiences. For as Helene Vosters reported, journalists have been virtually locked out of most of the nation’s prisons since a 1974US Supreme Court case ( Pell v. Procunier ) determined that journalistic access toprisons and prisoners was not protected by the First Amendment. 21 Journalist Ted

Conover became a prison guard at Sing Sing for a year because the state refused hisrequest to shadow new prison guard recruits. In his book, Newjack , Conover explainsthat the only way to get the story was to ‘‘live the life.’’22

As prison activists and communication scholars, access to prisons is an area wherewe can form alliances with journalists and journalism professors. The Society forProfessional Journalists has developed an ‘‘Open Prisons’’ project that details prisonaccess policies for each state, yet, as the Society notes, prison access policies areconstantly changing and becoming more restrictive. 23 For example, for the third yearin a row, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would makeit easier for journalists to interview prisoners, arguing that ‘‘violent criminals shouldnot be able to traumatize their victims a second time by having unfettered access tothe media.’’ 24 Although prison activists and journalists in California are now organizing to lobby the legislature to overturn the veto, the case in California makesit clear that the struggle to increase media access to prisons is one thatcommunication and cultural studies scholars must join. We therefore call uponour colleagues to help us organize to pressure local, state, and federal legislators,prison boards, and departments of correction to loosen these restrictions on mediaaccess to the nation’s prisons.

While fighting for more open access to prisons and prisoners is a crucial aspect of

what PCARE hopes to accomplish, we also call upon our colleagues to turn theirtalents to both analyzing and producing media representations of crime andcriminals. Indeed, because the corporate media are devoted not to providinginformation, cultural enlightenment, or education and public service, but to utilizingspectacles of violence and sex to raise profit levels and please shareholders, we callupon our colleagues to help us debunk the society of the spectacle. 25 To illustrate,some activist organizations are working to create, distribute, and promote alternative,independent media that provide honest, in-depth information on what is happeninginside the nation’s prisons. The Chicago-based Beyondmedia Education group hasproduced What We Leave Behind and Voices in Time , documentary films chroniclingthe ordeals faced by women both in prison and in their post-release lives. 26 Similarly,Paper Tiger Television of New York aims to ‘‘represent the people and views that are

408 PCARE



largely absent from the mainstream media’’ by distributing videos like America’s Least Wanted .27 We can theorize these projects as pursuing a new realism, a genre of truth-telling stripped bare of the mass media’s spectacular stereotypes. As scholars, teachers,activists, public speakers, film and cultural critics, and sometimes media producers,scholars of communication and cultural studies are uniquely situated to teach,support, and participate in this move toward a new realism.

While these independent media organizations provide alternatives to the corporatemedia’s distortions regarding crime, they are limited to small audiences who have aprior interest in a particular area of coverage. Communication and cultural studiesscholars and prison activists could benefit, then, from collaborating with the growingmedia reform movement, which is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Free Press,‘‘a national nonpartisan organization working to increase informed public participa-tion in crucial media policy debates, and to generate policies that will produce a more

competitive and public interest-oriented media system with a strong nonprofit andnoncommercial sector.’’ 28 Ultimately, it will require massive reform of the corporateUS media system for issues such as prisoner abuse, the inhumane conditions insideUS prisons, racial discrimination in sentencing policy, and the failures of the deathpenalty to receive serious coverage in the mainstream press. The fate of the movementagainst the prison Á industrial complex therefore hinges in no small part on the ability of communication and cultural studies scholars to help activists debunk the society of the spectacle’s macabre fascination with violence.

A New Research Agenda: The Call of Social Justice Scholarship Our colleagues have begun to lay the foundation for a more thorough investigation of the problems posed by the prison Á industrial-complex. For example, John Sloop,Michael Huspek and Lynn Comerford, and Frederick Corey have analyzed theconstruction of prisoners’ identities and the cultural manifestations of the disciplineindustry. 29 Stephen Hartnett has used investigative poetry to witness the relentlesshumiliation and devastating anger produced in prison while also offering stories of how this inhumane system can be transformed. 30 Steven Jackson has studied thecollusion between corporations and prison industries, while Travis Dixon and Jimmie

Reeves and Richard Campbell have studied how mass-imprisonment is bolstered by media stereotypes. 31 Susan Freinkel and Eleanor Novek are challenging the lack of access to prisons and prisoners and beginning to study the role of media in prisons. 32

Some public opinion and interpersonal communication scholars have also begun tostudy the problem. 33 Jennifer Wood has examined how victims are turned intoproponents, sometimes against their wishes, of harsher sentences. 34 And commu-nication scholars Robert Branham, Stephen Hartnett, Ed and Shelly Hinck, KristenValentine, and Aaron Warriner have argued that teaching performance, publicspeaking, and debate skills in prisons are powerful ways to enable prisoners to begintackling the injustices of the prison Á industrial complex. 35 These works amount to apotent series of engagements with the crisis of US democracy in an age of mass-incarceration.




Building upon this list of accomplishments, we call upon our colleagues to pushtheir work in more activist directions. In issuing this charge, we follow in thefootsteps of the late Dwight Conquergood, who spent years doing research on andadvocating on behalf of the gang members with whom he lived as a neighbor, teacher,and substitute father figure in the decimated Cabrini Green public housing of Chicago. Inspired by Conquergood’s bravery, Larry Frey, Barnett Pearce, Mark Pollock, Lee Artz, and Bren Murphy implored their fellow communication scholars in1996 to conduct research ‘‘not only about but for and in the interests of the peoplewith whom’’ the research is conducted. Frey and his colleagues thus asked engagedscholars to link their academic work to community needs, and thus to produce worksthat ‘‘foreground ethical concerns,’’ ‘‘commit to structural analyses of ethicalproblems,’’ ‘‘adopt an activist orientation,’’ and ‘‘seek identification with others.’’ 36

PCARE supports this push for engaged scholarship that understands itself as

maintaining the highest academic standards while also playing active roles instruggles for social justice.

Engaged Critical Pedagogy: Teaching and Practicing Democracy

The rise of the prison Á industrial complex has coincided with (and according to somescholars even caused ) a terrible decline in America’s public education system. In 1997,California spent more money on its prison system (9.4 percent of its annual budget)than on its universities and state colleges combined (8.7 percent); the state thusboasted four black men in its prisons for every one black man in college. Theseskewed priorities are reflected nationally as well, for in 1994 there were more AfricanAmerican men in prisons (583,000) than in colleges (537,000). 37 Think about theimplications of those startling facts: an entire generation of young black men is beingtrained not to be future leaders but repeat offenders. Furthermore, 68 percent of stateprison inmates did not finish high school, meaning there is a direct relationshipbetween declining schools and expanding prisons. Young people who do not finishschool are so much more likely to enter prison than students who complete highschool that some scholars have begun referring to a ‘‘schools-to-prison pipeline.’’ 38

This should be a grave concern to all educators; communication and cultural studies

scholars in particular can lend their expertise to studying how our incarcerationnation has chosen to spend more money on prisons than schools by asking: Whatnarratives underwrite this catastrophic choice? What public images and arguments justify this schools-to-prisons pipeline? What organizational structures enable andadvocate for this disastrous transfer of resources from education to incarceration?

While we search for answers to these troubling questions we simultaneously callupon our colleagues to begin teaching classes that both address and attempt toresolve the crisis. One obvious route to this goal is to teach classes in prisons and jails,for the evidence is clear: education reduces recidivism. 39 Considering that 97 percentof the people who are currently incarcerated are scheduled to be released within thenext twenty years, prison education should not only be at the center of any discussionof the prison Á industrial complex but be at the center of any discussion about public

410 PCARE



education. Nonetheless, despite the evidence that education reduces recidivism,supporters of prison education face a difficult rhetorical situation, for our opponentsargue that prison education is a waste of valuable resources and is unfair to law-abiding Americans who have to spend their hard-earned money to send their childrento school. 40 Such arguments are supported by the false but tenacious belief that theinterests of people who are incarcerated are different from and in opposition topeople on the outside. We call upon our colleagues to transform these beliefs by arguing along with us that prison education is a crucial investment in safecommunities and healthy democracy.

Indeed, the members of PCARE agree that educational offerings in prisons enablestudent prisoners to see the world anew and thus to build careers and lives thatformerly seemed impossible. As Billy Mason, a former Indiana prisoner, said in aninterview about his experiences with college in prison: ‘‘education saved my life.’’ Like

Mason, men and women who take college classes in prisons find themselves openingto new senses of what is possible. At our colleges and universities, we celebrate themany ways a liberal arts education empowers our on-campus students: enhancedlanguage and writing skills, sharpened analytic and aesthetic sensibilities, and deeperhistorical and cultural understanding serve as necessary life skills, as building blocksfor becoming better citizens. These skills are just as essential to people who are incarcerated , and those of us who teach communication and cultural studies canprovide them just as effectively to the imprisoned as to the free. Surely this is apedagogical service we can and should offer the nation, for we are in the business of opening minds, of teaching life skills, and of helping our neighbors achieve theirdreams. 41

We accordingly believe that prison classrooms can be laboratories for action whereeducation becomes what bell hooks calls the ‘‘practice of freedom.’’ 42 In fact, fromMalcolm X’s prison debating experiences to Wilbert Rideau’s compelling prison journalism, prison education has a rich history of facilitating social change, thusoffering exciting opportunities for future scholarship, pedagogy, and activism. As PhilBayliss explains, ‘‘Prison education challenges everything that prison institutionaliza-tion is about: control, minimizing personal freedom and choice, elimination of decision making, and reduction of self-esteem. . . . It can liberate.’’43 Yet, because the

liberatory potential of prison education ‘‘challenges everything that prison institu-tionalization is about,’’ this form of activism poses dilemmas for some prisoneducators and activists. On the one hand, some educators worry that activist aimscan jeopardize educational programs that enjoy the support of prison administra-tions; on the other hand, some activists worry that educators who work in prisonslend credibility to a system that should be abolished, not made more humane.PCARE is committed to refusing this false dilemma, for we believe that prisonersshould have access to educational offerings now, even as we work to abolish theprison Á industrial complex in the long run * the goals of education and abolition arenot mutually exclusive. We are therefore interested in persuading our colleagues torecognize how their traditional pedagogical practices can be turned to politicalpurposes by teaching in and about prisons.




Consider the successful partnership formed by Ed Panetta, director of the debateprogram at the University of Georgia, and Susan Shlaer, director of education atthe Lee Arrendale State Prison. The debate program they have constructed offerspeople who are incarcerated opportunities to engage in debates among themselves aswell as with debate teams comprising students from the outside. Bringing informeddebate and passionate commitment into a prison organized around silence andcompliance, the debate program teaches its participants not only how to argue buthow to practice engaged citizenship. 44 A similar program has been run for almosttwenty years by Ball State University and the Indiana Department of Corrections,wherein thousands of prisoners have had the opportunity to learn public speakingskills by debating amongst themselves and against visiting debate teams. An evenmore expansive program of educational offerings is enabling prisoners at California’sSan Quentin Prison to pursue their potential not only in debating and public

speaking classes, but also via history, literature, math, language, art, and otherofferings. The San Quentin program schedules 12 Á 15 classes each semester (threetimes per year) and reaches more than 400 imprisoned students each academic year.Moreover, by publishing a biannual newsletter and hosting other consciousness- andfund-raising activities, the architects of the San Quentin program have begun the hardtask of making prison education a regular topic of public debate in the Bay Area *they are thus merging liberatory pedagogy, political advocacy, and media activism. 45

While liberatory pedagogy may indeed save the lives of some students, its moreimmediate goal is to break down the walls dividing free and imprisoned populations,hence opening up a space for dialogue and shared political action. As Paulo Freireargues, the ‘‘fundamental objective’’ of liberatory pedagogy is ‘‘to fight alongside thepeople for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity.’’ Thus, liberatory prisoneducation is not conducted for students who are incarcerated, but with incarceratedand free students in the hopeful project of pursuing the liberation of all. Althoughachieving that end result is important, those of us who practice liberatory pedagogy try to focus our immediate energies on building the processes of engagement anddialogue that might lead to it. 46

Another promising example of liberatory pedagogy in action is Lori Pompa’sInside-Out program at Temple University. The program brings college students of the

free world and incarcerated students together as equals in the classroom, thusdemocratizing the notion of service-learning. Instead of free world individualssupporting students on the inside, Inside-Out takes a collaborative approach in whicheducators, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women, future criminal justice professionals, and community members come together to talk, think,problem-solve, and act across profound social barriers as equals. No offering of sympathy or charity, Inside-Out builds community by breaking down social barriers,thus demonstrating how practicing liberatory pedagogy can be a powerfulcommunity-building tool. 47

In that same vein, Ann Arbor’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) takesUniversity of Michigan undergraduates and sends them into Michigan prisons, wherethey participate in dance, poetry, and art workshops. Offering sessions in dozens of

412 PCARE



prisons around the state, PCAP ends each academic year with an art show on theUniversity of Michigan campus. Along with the visual art displayed on campus,PCAP prints an annual anthology of writings from prisoners, hence building spaceswhere people the prison Á industrial complex wants silenced can show themselvesinstead as public figures capable of making art, writing poems, and persuading theirneighbors of the need for political change. Building upon the PCAP model, theUniversity of Illinois’s Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society has begunsponsoring an annual prisoner arts festival. At the 2006 festival, activists displayed artmade by prisoners, screened films made by the formerly incarcerated, and readpoems by their incarcerated students; these events in turn generated media coverage,fueled on-line debates, and spawned new collaborations among the university, localactivists, and the local arts community. 48

Finally, the scores of Innocence Projects and the recently formed Innocence Institute

also offer compelling examples of programs that are breaking down prison walls by combining education and activism. Relying upon the volunteer work of journalismand law students, Innocence Projects investigate prisoners’ claims of innocence andhave led to hundreds of exonerations of wrongly convicted people (between 1989 and2003, 340 people have been exonerated). 49 Just as important, these programs havebeen instrumental in publicizing the rampant problems in the criminal justice system.For example, a handful of journalism undergraduates at Northwestern’s Medill Schoolof Journalism unearthed evidence resulting in the widely publicized exoneration of 10 people * five of them on death row * that not only led Illinois Governor GeorgeRyan to issue a moratorium on the use of the death penalty but also sparked a nationaldebate about the future of the death penalty. There is now an Innocence Projectserving every state (with the exceptions of Hawaii, North Dakota and South Dakota);PCARE believes communication and cultural studies scholars can find creative ways tolink their teaching and scholarship with these groups. 50

As a field committed to free speech, self expression, media literacy, and unfettereddialogue, the practices of liberatory pedagogy should feel strikingly familiar. Whetherit is the arts programming of PCAP, the debate programs at Ball State and GeorgiaState, the educational offerings at San Quentin, or the Inside-Out program at Temple,the scholars and activists involved understand that knowledge is power, that self

expression is always political, and that democracy works best when many voices *

from both sides of the prison walls * are raised in thoughtful and creative dialogue.

‘‘Swarms of Officers Harass Our People’’; or, How History Calls Us to Action

Lest readers worry that we are asking too much of them, we should recall thatfighting against a corrupt criminal justice system is one of the foundational actsof heroism in US history. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, forexample, may be read in large part as a critique of the British forerunner to our ownprison Á industrial complex. Everyone knows that Jefferson charged King George IIIwith pursuing ‘‘absolute despotism’’; what is not well known, however, is that many of Jefferson’s charges point directly to the administration of law and order. Jefferson’s




charges against the King included: ‘‘He has obstructed the Administration of Justice. . . . He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone. . . . He has erected amultitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass ourpeople. . . . [He has] deprived us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury. . . .

[And he has] transported us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.’’ ForJefferson and his fellow rebels, King George’s rule was illegitimate in large partbecause he had bent the justice system to doing his political bidding: law and orderhad become a corrupt weapon of oppression, not a common good. The AmericanRevolution was fought in large part, then, to overthrow an unjust system of law andorder, one that pales in comparison to the abuses foisted upon the US by the prison Á industrial complex today. 51

We offer these brief historical comments to demonstrate that arguing aboutcriminal justice is as old as the nation itself. 52 In fact, from Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration

of Independence and Benjamin Rush’s 1787 lectures against public punishments toRobert Rantoul’s 1835 plea against the death penalty, from John O’Sullivan’scelebrated 1842 speeches against judicial corruption to Ida B. Wells’s 1893barnstorming tour against lynching, from Clarence Darrow’s 1924 lectures againstthe death penalty to Eugene Victor Debs’s stirring 1927 Walls and Bars , from MartinLuther King Jr.’s canonical 1963 ‘‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’’ to George Jackson’srevolutionary 1970 Soledad Brother and Angela Davis’s 1974 An Autobiography , fromNorma Stafford’s poetic 1975 Dear Somebody to Patricia McConnel’s stories in her1995 Sing Soft, Sing Loud , from Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg’s heartbreaking 1992Life Sentences to Mumia Abu Jamal’s death row-penned 1997 Death Blossoms * to say nothing of films, music and plays * our national experiment in democracy has beenentwined with the struggle to build a fair criminal justice system. 53

From this perspective, PCARE’s concerns about the prison Á industrial complex arenot marginal to our national dialogue but historically rooted at the core of what itmeans to be an American. Communication and cultural studies scholars, advocatesfor peace and justice, prison-based educators, and critics of the prison Á industrialcomplex therefore have a rich national treasure of themes and figures, stories andmyths, and speeches and debates to draw upon in the fight against the prison Á industrial complex. The fate of the nation, to say nothing of our collective conscience

as scholars, may well depend upon our ability to reclaim these historical resources asinventional tools for fighting for social justice.

Notes

[1] PCARE is the Prison Communication Activism Research and Education collective, a groupof NCA-afliated scholars who began meeting in 2003. Sections of this essay were drafted by Beate Gersh, Stephen Hartnett, Edward Hinck, Shelly Hinck, Daniel Larson, Bryan McCann,Jonathan Marlow, Lori Pompa, Carol Stabile, Robert Wells, Jennifer Wood, and BillYousman. Final compilation, editing, and additional drafting were performed by Hartnettand Wood. All website addresses in these notes were live on 14 September 2007.

[2] Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 13; and seeChristian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso,

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1999) and The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission ,ed. Steven Donziger (New York: Harper, 1996).

[3] Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 11; and see Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire * Interviews with Angela Davis , ed. EduardoMendietta (New York: Seven Stories, 2005).

[4] President Dwight Eisenhower’s 17 January 1961 Farewell Address, p. 2 of the versiondownloaded from http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm.

[5] On Eisenhower’s duplicity with the very thing he warns against, see Robert Ivie, ‘‘Eisenhoweras Cold Warrior,’’ in Eisenhower’s War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership , ed. MartinMedhurst (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 7 Á 25, and Ivie,Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).

[6] Figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (hereafter BJS), Special Report: State Prison Expenditures, 2001 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 2004); and see David Shichor,Punishment for Prot: Private Prisons/Public Concerns (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995) andThe Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry , ed. Daniel Burton-Rose(Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998).

[7] See Mike Davis, ‘‘Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison Á Industrial Complex,’’ The Nation (20February 1995): 229 Á 34; Eric Scholosser, ‘‘The Prison Á Industrial Complex’’ The Atlantic Monthly (December 1998), 51 Á 77; Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry; Towards Gulags,Western Style, 2nd ed . (London: Routledge, 1994); and Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000).

[8] Figures from the BJS, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear, 2003 (Washington, DC:Department of Justice, 2004), 4 Á 9; BJS, Prisoners in 2003 (Washington, DC: Departmentof Justice, 2004), 1 Á 3; BJS,Prisoners in 2004 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2005),1 Á 3; Research, Development, and Statistics Directorate, Home Ofce, United Kingdom,World Prison Population List (London: Crown, 2004), 3; BJS, Probation and Parole in the US,2002 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2003), 1; BJS, Prevalence of Imprisonment in the US, 1974 Á 2001 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2003), 1.

[9] On the historical echoes of slavery in the US prison system, see Frankling Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),89 Á 118; Stephen John Hartnett, ‘‘Prison Labor, Slavery, and Capitalism in HistoricalPerspective,’’ Dark Night Field Notes 11 (Winter 1998): 25 Á 29; and Michael Stephen Hindus,Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina,1767 Á 1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

[10] For a description of the racial disparities in the prison Á industrial complex, see HumanRights Watch, Incarcerated America (2003), available at http://hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/; for counterarguments, see John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000) and William Wilbanks, The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1987).

[11] Regarding public defenders and their clients, see Ken Armstrong, Florangela Davila, andJustin Mayo, ‘‘For Some, Free Counsel Comes at a High Cost,’’ Seattle Times (4 April 2004),available at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/unequaldefense/stories/one/, andJoshua C. Krumholz, ‘‘Provide Adequate Funding,’’ National Law Journal (24 October2005), available at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe

[12] Consider the fact that in New York and California, blacks and Hispanics totaled 91 percentand 71 percent, respectively, of drug-possession incarcerations (see ‘‘Does the PunishmentFit the Crime? Drug Users and Drunk Drivers, Questions of Race and Class,’’ a SentencingProject report available at http://sentencingproject.org/pdfs/9040smy.pdf); and see StephenJohn Hartnett, ‘‘A Rhetorical Critique of The Drug War and ‘The Nauseous Pendulum’ of Reason and Violence,’’ The Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 16:3 (August 2000):247 Á 71; Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism & The War on Drugs (Boston: South




End Press, 1991); and Drug War Politics , ed. Eva Bertram (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996).

[13] See Marsha Tarver, Steve Walker, and Harvey Wallace, Multicultural Issues in the Criminal Justice System(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002), 42 Á 45, and Chaka Ferguson, ‘‘Report: Black,White Disparities Abound,’’ Associated Press Online (23 March 2004), available at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe

[14] See the BJS,Capital Punishment, 2002 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2003); JohnC. McAdams, ‘‘Racial Disparity and the Death Penalty,’’ Law and Contemporary Problems 61(Autumn 1998): 153 Á 70, and the US General Accounting Ofce, ‘‘Death Penalty Sentencing:Research Indicates a Pattern of Racial Disparities,’’ in The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies , ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 268 Á 74.

[15] See Marc Mauer, ‘‘Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Votes,’’ in Invisible Punishment:The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment , ed. Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: New Press, 2002), 50 Á 58; Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States (Washington, DC: The Sentencing

Project, 1998); and Elizabeth Hull, The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2006).[16] Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1992), 15 Á 42 on the Horton scandal, quotation from 35.[17] Beatrix Campbell, ‘‘Boys Will be Boys: Social Insecurity and Crime,’’ in Insecure Times: Living

with Insecurity in Contemporary Society , ed. John Vail, Jane Wheelock, and Michael Hill(London: Routledge, 1999), 184 Á 98, quotation from 187; for historical perspectives, seeKaren Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Carol Stabile, White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006).

[18] BJS, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear, 2004 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice,

2005), 3; and see Women and Prisons at http://womenandprison.org[19] Sasha Abramsky, ‘‘Crime as America’s Pop Culture,’’ The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education (15 November 2002), B11 Á 12.

[20] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; New York:Zone, 2004), # 68, p. 45, and # 64, p. 42.

[21] HeleneVosters, ‘‘Media Lockout: Prisons and Journalists,’’ Media Alliance (13 May 2004),available at http://media-alliance.org

[22] Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (New York: Random House, 2000).[23] See the Open Prisons project at http://spj.org/prisonaccess.asp[24] Associated Press, ‘‘Schwarzenegger Vetoes Bill Expanding Media Access to Prisons,’’ The

Mercury News (30 September 2006), available at http://mercurynews.com/mld/mercury

news/news/local/states/california/northern_california/15648955.htm[25] Along these lines, see The Future of the Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century , ed.Robert McChesney, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005),303 Á 72.

[26] Contact Beyondmedia Education at http://beyondmedia.org[27] Quotation from Paper Tiger’s ‘‘What is PTTV?,’’ available at http://papertiger.org[28] Quotation from the Free Press ‘‘About’’ section, available at http://freepress.net/; and see the

related materials from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, available at http://fair.org[29] John M. Sloop, The Cultural Prison: Discourse, Prisoners, and Punishment (Tuscaloosa:

University of Alabama Press, 1996); Michael Huspek and Lynn Comerford, ‘‘How Science isSubverted: Penology and Prison Inmates’ Resistance,’’ Communication Theory 6, issue 4

(1996): 335 Á 60; and Frederick C. Corey, ‘‘Personal Narratives and Young Men in Prison:Labeling the Outside Inside,’’ Western Journal of Communication (1996): 57 Á 75.

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[30] Stephen John Hartnett, Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2003) ; and see Judith Tannenbaum, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000).

[31] Steven J. Jackson, ‘‘Ex-Communication: Competition and Collusion in the US PrisonTelephone Industry,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, issue 4 (2005): 263 Á 80;Travis Dixon and Daniel Linz, ‘‘Race and the Misrepresentation of Victimization onLocal Television News,’’ Communication Research 27, issue 5 (2000): 547 Á 73; Travis Dixon,Cristina Azocar, and Michael Casas, ‘‘The Portrayal of Race and Crime on TelevisionNetwork News,’’ Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 47, issue 4 (2003): 498 Á 523; andJimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

[32] Susan Freinkel, ‘‘Keeping Prisoners from the Press,’’ Columbia Journalism Review 35, issue 3(1996): 20 Á 21; Eleanor M. Novek, ‘‘‘Heaven, Hell, and Here’: Understanding the Impact of Incarceration through a Prison Newspaper,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 22,issue 4 (2005): 281 Á 301; and Novek, ‘‘‘The Devil’s Bargain,’’’ Journalism 6, issue 1 (2005):5 Á 23.

[33] Jeff Manza, Clem Brooks, and Christopher Uggen, ‘‘Public Attitudes Toward FelonDisenfranchisement in the United States,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 68, issue 2 (2004):275 Á 86; Gary D. Bond, Daniel M. Malloy, Elizabeth A. Arias, Shannon N. Nunn, and LauraA. Thompson, ‘‘Lie-biased Decision Making in Prison,’’ Communication Reports 18, issue 1(2005): 9 Á 19; Chris Segrin and Jeanne Florra, ‘‘Perceptions of Relational Histories, MaritalQuality, and Loneliness When Communication Is Limited: An Examination of MarriedPrison Inmates,’’ Journal of Family Communication 1, issue 3 (2001): 151 Á 73.

[34] Jennifer K. Wood, ‘‘In Whose Name: Crime Victim Policy and the Punishing Power of Protection,’’ The National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17, issue 3 (2005): 1 Á 17.

[35] Robert Branham, ‘‘‘I Was Gone on Debating’: Malcolm X’s Prison Debates and PublicConfrontations,’’ Argument and Advocacy 31 (1995): 117 Á 37; Stephen John Hartnett,‘‘Lincoln and Douglas Meet the Abolitionist David Walker as Prisoners Debate Slavery:Empowering Education, Applied Communication, and Social Justice,’’ Journal of Applied Communication Research 26, issue 2 (1998): 232 Á 53; Ed and Shelly Hinck, ‘‘Service Learningand Forensics,’’ National Forensics Journal 16 (1998): 1 Á 26; Kristin Bervig Valentine, ‘‘‘If theGuards Only Knew’: Communication Education for Women in Prison,’’ Women’s Studies in Communication 21, issue 2 (1998): 238 Á 43; and Aaron Warriner, ‘‘Forensics in aCorrectional Facility,’’ National Forensics Journal 16 (1998): 27 Á 42.

[36] See Dwight Conquergood, ‘‘Homeboys and Hoods: Gang Communication and CulturalSpaces,’’ in Group Communication in Context: Studies of Natural Groups , ed. Larry Frey (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), 23 Á 55; Larry Frey, Barnett Pearce, Mark Pollock, Lee Artz, & Bren Murphy, ‘‘Looking for Justice in All the Wrong Places: On a Communication Approachto Social Justice,’’ Communication Studies 47 (1996): 110 Á 27, quotations from 117, 111; andsee Communication Activism, 2 vols., ed. Larry Frey and Kevin Carragee (Cresskill, NJ:Hampton, 2007).

[37] Figures from Kathleen Connolly, Lea McDermid, Vincent Schiraldi, and Dan Macallair, FromClassrooms to Cellblocks: How Prison Building Affects Higher Education and African American Enrollment (San Francisco: Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 1996), available athttp://cjcj.org; Fox Buttereld, ‘‘Prison-Building Binge in CA Casts Shadow on HigherEducation,’’ New York Times (12 April 1995), A11; and ‘‘More Inmates in the US than EverBefore,’’ New York Times (13 September 1994), A8.

[38] See ‘‘Education Not Incarceration,’’ a report by The Education not Incarceration Coalitionavailable at http://ednotinc.org; and see Reconstructing the School-to-Prison Pipeline , papersfrom a May 2003 conference hosted by The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University andThe Northeastern University Institute on Race and Justice.






Voice: African American Oratory, 1787 Á 1900 , ed. Philip Foner and Robert Branham(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 745 Á 60; Clarence Darrow’s 23 September1924 debate with Alfred J. Talley is available as Debate, Resolved: That Capital Punishment is a Wise Public Policy ; Clarence Darrow, Negative; Judge Talley, Positive (New York: League forPublic Discussion, 1924); Eugene Victor Debs, Walls and Bars : Prisons and Prison Life in the ‘‘Land of the Free’’ (1927; Chicago: Charles Kerr, 2000); Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘‘Letter froma Birmingham Jail’’ (16 April 1963), in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World , ed. James Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 83 Á 100; George Jackson,Soledad Brother : The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970; Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1994);Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974); NormaStafford, Dear Somebody: The Prison Poetry of Norma Stafford (Santa Cruz, CA: Privately Printed, 1975); Patricia McConnel, Sing Soft, Sing Loud (Flagstaff, AZ: Logoria, 1995);Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg, ed., Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars (New York: Times Books, 1992); and Mumia Abu Jamal, Death Blossoms : Reections from a Prisoner of Conscience (Philadelphia: Plough, 1997).

Appendix. Now Do This: A Checklist for Engaged Scholarship

We have asked our colleagues to help us change the world by fighting the prison Á industrialcomplex, and we have asked you to think of doing so both in broad historical terms and as ameans of reinventing the fields of communication and cultural studies as partners in thepursuit of social justice. In this appendix, we offer a checklist of actions that will help to makethis possible. We begin with an invitation to subscribe to the Prison-CARE listserv by sendingan e-mail to: [email protected]. Further, we challenge our

colleagues to pledge that they will fulfill one task on this checklist each month.

Communication Activism. Learn more about the media access policies in your state at the Society for

Professional Journalists’ website (http://spj.org/prisonaccess.asp).. Participate in the work of media literacy groups dedicated to debunking the societyof

the spectacle, including The Action Coalition for Media Education (http://www.acmecoalition.org), Media Channel (http://www.mediachannel.org), MediaWatch (http://www.mediawatch.org),and MediaTank (http://www.mediatank.org).

. Participate in the work of media advocacy groups dedicated to ending corporatecontrol of the media, including Free Press (http://freepress.net) and Fairness andAccuracy in Reporting (http://www.fair.org).

. Participate in groups producing the ‘‘new realism’’ regarding the prison Á industrialcomplex, including Beyondmedia Education (http://www.beyondmedia.org),Paper Tiger (http://www.papertiger.org), and the Prison Radio Project (http://www.prisonradio.org).

. Write letters to the Op Ed pages of your local paper, call in to radio shows, andcontribute to on-line discussions, blogs, and other web-based forms of commu-

nication.. Start your own radio show, public access TV show, newspaper column, or blog.




Teaching . Offer graduate and undergraduate classes on your campus that include sections on

the prison Á industrial complex; help to historicize the cultural fictions that makethe prison Á industrial complex appear legitimate, and help students imagine waysto live without it.

. Offer college classes or educational workshops in local jails and state prisons.

. Convene conferences, panels at conferences, working groups, brown-bag sessions,and other gatherings where teachers and students can talk about the prison Á industrial complex.

. Partner with local high schools to donate your time to mentoring and tutoringprograms that try to keep youth out of the prison system.

. Encourage graduate students and colleagues to write about the prison Á industrialcomplex.

Scholarship . Tailor your scholarship to address the many questions and crises raised in this

article.. Partner with existing advocacy groups (see the list offered below) that can use your

research skills to attack the prison Á industrial complex.. Make publishing articles, delivering conference presentations, and giving public

lectures about the prison Á industrial complex a regular part of your scholarly production.

Grassroots Participation . Donate time to your local Books-2-Prisoners program; for lists of local

programs, go to http://prisonlegalnews.org/links/books_to_prisoners.htm orhttp://prisonbookprogram.org/documents/NPRL.pdf

. Work with local victim-offender restitution programs; lists of programs can befound at http://voma.org/links.shtml or http://ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/infores/restorative_justice/96521-dir_victim-offender/welcome.html

.

Work in a transitional housing unit for the formerly incarcerated; mentor a formerprisoner; partner with those who need help making the leap from prison tofreedom.

. Volunteer to work with The Sentencing Project (http://www.sentencingproject.org); your local Innocence Project (consult the list at http://truthinjustice.org/ips.html); Critical Resistance (http://www.criticalresistance.org); the Prison Acti-vist Resource Center (http://www.prisonactivist.org); or other local groupsattacking the prison Á industrial complex.

420 PCARE

Documents

PCARE, "Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex"