UNIT 1: Origins & Logic of the Prison

Week 1: Tuesday, January 20

Introduction & Welcome

No readings this week.

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Week 2: Tuesday, January 27

Enlightened Punishment

Readings:

• Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764), selections:
  • Chapter I: Of the Origin of Punishment
  • Chapter II: Of the Right to Punish
  • Chapter VI: Of the Proportion Between Crimes and Punishment
  • Chapter XII: Of the Intent of Punishments
  • Chapter XXVIII: Of the Punishment of Death
  • Chapter XXIX: Of Imprisonment
• Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon, or, the Inspection-House Letters 1, 2, 6” in Selected Writings (2011).

Topics: Enlightenment philosophy of punishment; utilitarianism and deterrence; the birth of the penitentiary ideal

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Week 3: Tuesday, February 3

Reformation and Prison in the Early American Republic

Readings:

• Beaumont and Tocqueville, “Chapter 2” in On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application to France (1833)

• Eastern State Penitentiary directed by Christine Bowditch (Forged Images Production Cooperative, 1998)
  • Please watch the first 30 minutes only. CW: Violence
• Robert Dale Owen, “Essay 2” in A New View of Society (1816)

Topics: The penitentiary as American innovation; reform ideology; architecture and surveillance; the prison as experiment

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Week 4: Tuesday, February 10

Race & Repression during Reconstruction

Readings:

Historical Background:

• Ida B. Wells, “The Convict Lease System,” (1893)
• Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008), excerpts

Contemporary:

• Angela Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition” (1988)
• Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli, Aiyuba Thomas, “Introduction” in Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery (2024)
• Free Alabama Movement, “Let the Crops Rot in the Field: A Call For New Strategy in The National Movement Against Mass Incarceration and Prison Slavery” (2017)
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore, “Some Reflections on Prison Labor” (2019)

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UNIT 2: Contemporary Critics of the Prison & Police

Week 5: Tuesday, February 17

Angela Davis and the Prison Rights Movement

Background Readings:

• Mariame Kaba, “Attica Prison Uprising 101: A Short Primer” (2011)
• Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, “Introduction” in Rethinking the American Prison Movement (2018)

Primary Sources:

• Angela Y. Davis, “Lectures on Liberation” (1967)
• —, “Part I: Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation” in If They Come In the Morning(1971)
• —, “Statement to the Court” (1971)
• —, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), selections
• Huey P. Newton, “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?”

proposal step 2 slides

ASSIGNMENT DUE: Topic Proposal (2-3 pages) — Friday, February 20 at 11:59 PM via email

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Week 6: Tuesday, February 24

Angela Davis Against Carceral Feminism

Background Readings:

• Aya Gruber, The Feminist War on Crime, selections
• robin mc’duff, deanne pernell and karen saunders, “Open Letter to the Anti-Rape Movement” (1977)
• Julia Sudbury, “Rethinking Antiviolence Strategies: Lessons from the Black Women’s Movement in Britain”
  • Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Primary Sources:

• Angela Y. Davis, “Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism” (1985)
• —, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist” (1981)
• Critical Resistance and INCITE!, “Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex” (1998)
• The Abolitionist, Vol. 2, Summer 2005

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Week 7: Tuesday, March 3

Davis and the Meaning of Emancipation

Background Readings:

• W.E.B. Du Bois, “Chapter VII: Looking Forward” in Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
• Bernard Harcourt, “Abolition Democracy as a Philosophy of History” (2020)

Primary Sources:

• Angela Davis, “Abolition Democracy” in Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empires, Prison and Torture (2000)
• —, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

Research Project Step 3

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Week 8: Tuesday, March 10

SPRING BREAK — NO CLASS —

Week 9: Tuesday, March 17

Ruth Gilmore and the Campaign to Change Everything

Background Readings:

• Loic Wacquant, “Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the Punitive Upsurge”(2008)

Primary Sources:

• “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition” The Intercept Briefing (2020)
  • “Part 1”
  • “Part 2”
  • Printable Transcript Here

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

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Week 10: Tuesday, March 24

Geography as a Method

Background Readings:

• “Geographies of Racial Capitalism,” Antipode (2020)

Primary Readings:

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Prologue: The Bus” in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)
• —, “Chapter 1. Introduction” in Golden Gulag (2007)

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

ASSIGNMENT DUE: Annotated Bibliography (8-12 sources) — Friday, March 27 at 11:59 PM via email

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Week 11: Tuesday, March 31

Gilmore Organizing for Abolition

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)
  • Chapter 6: “What Is to Be Done?”
• —, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” in Abolition Geography (2022)

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

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Week 12: Tuesday, April 7

Transformative Justice & Collective Care

Primary Sources:

• Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (2021), selections:
  • Part I: So You’re Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist
  • Part II: There Are No Perfect Victims
  • Part III: The State Can’t Give Us Transformative Justice
  • Part VI: Accountability is Not Punishment

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

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Week 13: Tuesday, April 14

Abolition Feminism and Prefigurative Politics

Primary Sources:

• Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (2021), selections:
  • Part IV: Making Demands: Reforms For and Against Abolition
  • Part V: We Must Practice and Experiment
  • Part VII: Show Up and Don’t Travel Alone

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

Week 14: Tuesday, April 21

Building Abolition Democracy

• Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, No. More. Police.
  • “No Soft Police”
  • “How Do We Get There?”
  • “Experiment and Build”

Submit your weekly discussion questions here

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Week 15: Tuesday, April 28

Student Presentations & Contemporary Carceral Sites

Format: Student presentations on research findings (10-15 minutes each + discussion)

What to bring:

• Visual or text-based presentation of your chosen carceral site/problem
• Key findings from your annotated bibliography
• Preliminary analysis using frameworks from Units 2-3

ASSIGNMENT DUE: Final Paper — Friday, May 8 at 11:59 PM via email

Important Dates

Date	Event
Tuesday, January 20	First class
Friday, February 20	Topic Proposal Due
Friday, March 27	Annotated Bibliography Due
Tuesday, April 21 & 28	In-Class Presentations
Friday, May 8	Final Paper Due

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