Jennifer Lieberman contextualizes our contemporary imagination of the prison. She chronicles how, in the fin de siècle West, fantasies about technologically brightened futures reigned, from stunning architectural displays through the crinkling pages of dime novels. The prison was reimagined according to similar techno-utopian imaginaries during this time. While World’s Fairs celebrated modern inventions like electricity and pneumatics, a parallel group met to imagine how to perfect the prison: the International Penitentiary Congress. Liberman analyzes archival documents about these meetings to explore how thinking about technology, narrative, ecology, and the future shaped the understanding of prisons in the U.S. through the early twentieth century. Ultimately, this paper chronicles how techno-utopian and dystopian thinking interact with techniques of incarceration, offering a Longue durée perspective on the ecologies of incarceration. By making this understudied history visible, she interrogates largely invisibilized technological rationalizations for inhumane treatment of incarcerated people.

Harley Pomper explores the legacy of techno-utopian thinking by situating us in Cook County Jail. In spite of the jail’s preference for the language of rehabilitation over language of punishment, insiders at CCJ face neglect, violence, and lack of sufficient health care, all of which contribute to an ongoing process of disablement. Pomper asks: In a facility where insiders take risks to have their basic needs met, how does the institution restructure conventional borders of disability? What constitutes ‘access’ to the facility, to each other, and to accommodation in a facility built to be inaccessible? While exploring these questions, Pomper describes how, midway through fieldwork, their access to the jail was revoked—and how they transitioned from entering the jail as a facilitator to organizing with insiders over the phone and mail. Pomper shares not only their research but also the community archive of inside testimony that has resulted from these inside-out organizing efforts.

Patrick Alexander then reframes the history and practice of carceral pedagogies, tracing the roots and routes of his own student-centered and student-led learning paradigm to critical prison studies scholar Angela Y. Davis’s approach to teaching behind bars. The paper emphasizes how Alexander and fellow teachers at Parchman/Mississippi State Penitentiary/Parchman (MS) and Orange Correctional Center (NC) esteem student leadership in ways that create classroom spaces shaped by what Davis terms “genuine solidarity”—a way of engaging with incarcerated people that affirms their humanity, agency, and intellectual curiosities in environments of state confinement. The paper also highlights the conceptual framework of “radical togetherness,” drawing attention to the solidarity-sustaining character work required of outside instructors who teach in prisons and build community with incarcerated learners. This, he argues, is ego-stripping, savior complex-eradicating work that demands that we who are not incarcerated do the hard work of intently listening to and learning from those who are incarcerated—or who have been incarcerated—as we collectively rethink what we study, how we learn, and why we teach.

Jane Robbins Mize and Isabel Lane close the session by sharing a project from their collaborative working group of writers, researchers, and artists. The center of this project—a graphic novella titled Evacuation Plan—began by asking if prisons have evacuation plans in the case of an environmental crisis and tells the story of two men incarcerated near a nuclear facility who search for an answer. The presenters describe how Evacuation Plan emerged through a series of conversations and collaborative exercises on the phone, in the visiting room, and in the cell block. By sharing their process and project, they offer a framework for collaborating across the prison wall that foregrounds creativity, resists hierarchy, and thinks together environmental justice and prison abolition.