ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses how his comprehension of the prison industrial complex, school-to-prison nexus, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs derives from his personal relationship to the prison industrial complex from having a parent who was incarcerated and his schooling experiences. This chapter showcases how ELA teachers and language and literacy educators are implicated in the school-to-prison nexus. The state-sanctioned curriculum erases the experiences of Black people and renders Black lives and the Black experience as disposable. To challenge the prison industrial complex and school-to-prison nexus, this chapter highlights how embracing the radical imagination has pushed the author to envision a world free of anti-Blackness, police violence, the prison industrial complex, and economic deprivation. This notion of the radical imagination stems from prison abolitionism—the abolitionist believes and argues that the prison system needs to be abolished as the main system of tackling social ills (Davis, 2016). Abolition isn’t just about eradicating the buildings of prisons, but it also pertains to critiquing and overturning the world we currently live in because the prison industrial complex and schools sustain and maintain violence, confinement, and the disposability of Black lives.
