ABSTRACT
I start this discussion of the expanding role of incarceration in the U.S. landscape and the pedagogical power of prisons within neoliberalism with a description of one piece of my anti-prison work that embodies the failures of our public institutions at this political moment. For almost 10 years, I have been coordinating and teaching in an alternative high school for formerly incarcerated men and women. Several years ago, at St. Leonard’s Adult High School, where we off er adults a second chance at earning a high school diploma, we started a “college and career night” to provide students with information about accessing post-secondary education. Students, men and women with still raw, or in some cases old, histories of incarceration, usually want to hear from representatives of local community colleges, drug and alcohol-abuse counselor training programs, and truck driving schools, and are generally interested in trade apprenticeships and other job training initiatives. Our students make no requests for information about medical, law, dental, teaching, or business schools; if we had south-facing windows in our classroom, then the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) would be visible from our learning space, but we have no such window, and we receive no requests and do not schedule representatives from UIC, or Northwestern University, or the University of Chicago, or Loyola University, or any of the other public and private “elite” institutions in Chicago. Even though these schools sometimes provide their students as tutors for our students, the unspoken and tacit consensus among St. Leonard’s students (and those of us who organize the school) is that institutions like UIC are impenetrable fortresses. Even my public and relatively open access university, Northeastern Illinois University, seems out of reach; institutions outside of Chicago might as well not exist. For example, “going downstate” in Illinois, an expression that generally refers to upper middle-class families venturing south from the greater Chicago area to visit the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign or the Illinois State University in Normal, means something completely diff erent to our students and their families and friends, for whom the phrase signifi es being shipped down to prisons located in the state’s rural southern communities. Th erefore, on the occasion of trying to support the hard-working students of St. Leonard’s Adult High Schoolto exercise their right to access an education, we collide, again, with the reality that education in America oft en functions like what can only be called a caste system.
