Higher Education and the Carceral State Transforming Together

Foreword

Larry Brewster

Introduction

Annie Buckley

Acknowledgements

Section I: Voices of Students

1. Scheduled Conflict

Alex Bolling

2. Transformation and Redemption: A Personal Narrative from a Position of Lived Experience

Ginny Emiko Oshiro

3. Transforming Lives Through Prison Higher Education

 Jeffrey Stein

4. The Freedom & Captivity Curriculum Project

Linda Small

5. Humanizing the Numbers: A Photographic Collaboration

Jamal Biggs and Isaac Wingfield

Section II: Collaborating in and through the System

6. Scaling walls: Dismantling Asymmetries through Empowering Song

André de Quadros, Wayland “X” Coleman, and Krystal Morin

7. Disappearing Acts” and Education as the Practice of Freedom: Feminist Pedagogy in Carceral Spaces

Laura E. Ciolkowski

8. The Brutal Stories That Connect Us

Joshua Fernandez

9. Matters of Life and Death: Art, Education, and Activism on Death Row

Robin Paris, Tom Williams, and Barbara Yontz

10. An Achingly Realized Sunset: The Importance of Prison Creative Writing

Jason Kahler

11. Transcommunal Peace, Cooperation, and Respect for Diversity: A University/Prison Multi-Partnership Approach

John Brown Childs, Flora Lu, and Sarah Woodside Bury

Section III Voices of Teaching Artists and Scholars

12. Writing About Art

Duston Spear

13. Beyond This Door: Photographic Vision and Carceral Experience

Evan Hume

14. Why French?: Fear and Freedom in Stepping Outside Our Languages

Cecelia Ramsey

15. Pushing Back/Pushing Forward: Embracing the Margins to Build Non-Punitive Learning Environments in Canadian Correctional Facilities

Nicole Patrie

16. Excursion and Return: Exploring Transformative Texts, Great Questions, and the Human Experience in the Prison Classroom

Dale Brown

Section IV: Changemaking and Coalition Building

17. The Poem. The Painting. Us.

Kyes Stevens

18. Building Bridges Through Prison-University Partnerships

Emma Hughes

19. Arts Research in Carceral Settings: Prison Arts Collective

Brian L. Heisterkamp, Bryant Joachim Jackson-Green, Ginny Emiko Oshiro, and Annie Buckley

20. Reimagining Our Futures: The Beginning, Middle, and End of the Digital Higher Education Journey for Incarcerated Learners

Helen Farley and Stephen Seymour

21. Structuring the Conduit: Expanding Prison-University Partnerships Through the Readers’ Circle

Keziah Poole and Rowan A. Bayne

22. An Octopus in the Scaffolding: Ten Years of Prison Arts Collective

Annie Buckley

Biography

Annie Buckley is the founder and director of Prison Arts Collective, an internationally recognized statewide Arts in Corrections program that has brought multidisciplinary arts classes and arts facilitator trainings to over 7,000 participants in 16 state prisons across California since 2013. In addition, she is the founding director of VISTA (Valuing Incarcerated Scholars through Academia), a new BA degree-granting program at San Diego State University, where she is also a professor and associate dean. Buckley is an artist, curator, and widely published author whose work has appeared in leading international contemporary art publications, including Artforum, Art in America, the Huffington Post, and she is an editor at large with the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she also wrote the series, “Art Inside” about facilitating arts programming in correctional settings.

'These interesting and compelling stories and accompanying photographs indicate far more than an intertwined transformation of higher education and the carceral state suggested in the title; they presage the dawn of a potential transformation of the institution of prison itself, from a hardened facility that systematically exploits the brute labour of the convicted to an educational incubator housing the creative talents of millions of souls.'
John R. Whitman, International Review of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-025-10168-z