Teaching on the inside: Social Justice through Prison Education

This project examines the process of creating critical and liberatory classrooms within the confines of prisons located in Southern California. Though prisons are sites of punishment and exclusion, they can also be sites of transformation and social justice, particularly when incarcerated students enroll in sociology courses as part of their college degree curricula. As a full-time faculty member who teaches at Southern California prisons, I illustrate how to apply critical theoretical approaches not only to the content/materials in the course but also to the practice of prison education. Through syllabus construction, assignment selection, and balancing the critical sociological views of Freire (1970) and hooks (1994) with the rules and regulations shaped by the state correctional facility, I invite students to interrupt hierarchical teaching practices and view the classroom as a place for co-learning. I highlight students' lived experiences as sources of epistemological knowledge production and innovation. It is in the classroom where incarcerated students find freedom from oppression.