Beyond Bars: Higher Education and Carceral Space

Although people think of universities and prisons as separate institutions, in fact they are highly interconnected. The UW holds contracts to purchase materials from prison labor, UW faculty engage in research projects focused on prisons, and state funding for incarceration impacts financial support for our university. Yet people who are currently and were formerly incarcerated often face the greatest barriers to entry at UW.

The term “school-to-prison pipeline” describes how disparities in access to quality education and targeting for disciplinary and police detention lead to a disproportionate number of non-white, non-heterosexual, and economically-disadvantaged youth ending up in prison, rather than higher education. However, a more accurate term is “school-to-prison nexus,” in which the pathways to prison or to college are not separate, but actually intertwined in the institutions we inhabit (Meiners 2007). In this talk, Prof. Gillian Harkins reports on her and her colleagues’ efforts to create sustainable pathways to higher education for this underserved population, by leveraging existing connections between universities and prisons.

Gillian Harkins, associate professor, Department of English; adjunct associate professor, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Washington.