Prison abolition literacies as Pro-Black pedagogy in early childhood education

Abstract

The prison abolition movement has brought attention to the American carceral crisis, or better yet, the mass incarceration and disproportionate criminalization of Black people in America. It has also led to and fomented recent calls to defund prison systems, the police, and to remove police from schools. While discussions of prison abolition have been addressed in the carceral studies literature, they are seldom addressed in the education literature and particularly in early childhood education. Given the ways in which young Black children are and have been negatively impacted by issues of mass incarceration (e.g. absence of family members, school-prison nexus), the lack of attention to the American carceral crisis and teaching about prison abolition is beyond concerning and contributes to the stanchless anti-Black violence Black children face in early childhood classrooms. Drawing on Pro-Blackness, the imprisoned Black radical tradition, and abolitionist teaching, we introduce what we term prison abolition literacies– literacies practices that bring awareness to the injustices of the carceral state and encourage young children to become prison abolitionists––so that teachers can infuse prison abolition into the early childhood education curriculum.

Keywords

Black children early childhood education prison studies

Teaching prison abolition in the early grades (typically understood as preK-third grade) is not a new phenomenon. In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP)––a political and community-based organization spearheaded by college students including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California that promoted Black Liberation including foci on the rights to full employment, decent housing and education, access to a high standard of medical care, ending police brutality, and compensation for years of economic inequity (Foner, 2014) –– taught young Black children the importance of advocating for those who were imprisoned (Benjamin, 2021; Magoon, 2021). It was through this advocacy that young children were exposed to a literacy program that taught them to not only “read the word, but also the world” (Freire, 1997) of incarceration (Benjamin, 2021). Black children as young as 4 years old “learned writing skills by writing poetry and letters to incarcerated BPP members, by attending trials of BPP members and other political prisoners, by distributing food at BPP-sponsored food giveaways, and by selling BPP newspapers” (Huggins and LeBlanc-Ernest, 2010). That being said, Black children also communicated regularly with people who were imprisoned, writing letters to them, and visiting them in prisons as they simultaneously developed the requisite reading and writing skills they needed to navigate the schooling system and society at large (Benjamin, 2021). The Black Panthers believed that young people “[were] the key to social transformation” (Magoon, 2021: p. 309), and believed in the importance of literacy and literate young people. As such, they infused prison abolition into its literacy program to enforce the idea that literacy is a social practice, should be informed by Pro-Blackness, and should be tethered to Black people’s individual and collective freedom (Magoon, 2021).

Despite the Black Panther Party’s successful, Pro-Black literacy program that can serve as a model for the teaching of early literacy (Benjamin, 2021), Black children in early childhood classrooms are still subjected to early literacy practices that not only de-emphasize Pro-Blackness, but also prison abolition. To that end, the authors of this article - a Black male assistant professor and a Black female assistant professor who both currently work at Predominantly White Institutions in the Midwest, and a Black male who is wrongfully incarcerated in a correctional facility in the Midwest - introduce what we term prison abolition literacies to the field of early childhood education (ECE). Our purpose is to bring attention to the injustices of the American carceral crisis, to inspire young children to work toward dismantling prison systems, and to encourage teachers to infuse prison abolition into the early childhood curriculum.

Against this backdrop, we begin this article by discussing anti-Blackness, the imprisoned Black radical tradition, Pro-Black pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching, which are all foundational to our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies (Boutte et al., 2021; Love, 2019; Robinson, 2000). We briefly explain why we need prison abolition literacies, and then explore the extant literature, focusing specifically on the academic and social landscape, the preschool-to-prison pipeline, and the educational enclosures of Black children in early childhood education, and their early literacy experiences therein. From there, we introduce what we term prison abolition literacies as Pro-Black pedagogy, followed by recommendations for early childhood teachers, providing specific examples on how to infuse prison abolition literacies in early childhood education.

Theoretical frameworks

Anti-Blackness

In the New York Times opinion article “Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness”, kihana miraya ross (2019) points readers to the concept of anti-Blackness in the midst of the worldwide protests regarding the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd. Arguing for the need to cease discourse that points to racism or the actions of one racist police officer as the cause for Floyd’s death, ross states: “George Floyd was killed because anti-Blackness is endemic to, and is central to how all of us make sense of the social, economic, historical and cultural dimensions of human life.” That being said, the theory of anti-Blackness is critical in understanding the “history of Black suffering in America” (Coles, 2018: p. 7). However, according to Boutte et al. (2021), Pro-Blackness is antithetical to anti-Blackness. And, as such, we cannot begin to address our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies as Pro-Black pedagogy without first discussing anti-Blackness.

The discussion of anti-Blackness within the field of education is most explicitly discussed within Black Critical Theory (henceforth, BlackCrit). BlackCrit moves beyond a general critique of race, and focuses precisely on anti-Blackness (Bryan, 2021). As Dumas and ross (2016) state, “[Anti-Blackness is] ...not simply racism against Black people. Rather, anti-Blackness refers to a broader antagonistic relationship between Blackness and (the possibility of) humanity” (p. 429). In this sense, anti-Blackness is exactly what “illuminates society’s inability to recognize our humanity—the disdain, disregard and disgust for our existence” (ross, 2019). Additionally, anti-Blackness acknowledges the specific history of racism towards and against Black people including children in America, and calls for the need to acknowledge such history to valorize the humanity of and to mitigate the quotidien anti-Black violence experienced by Black people in America and globally and children in and beyond schools.

Anti-Black violence

Drawing on BlackCrit and, more precisely anti-Blackness, Johnson et al. (2019) introduce the five types of anti-Black violence Black children face in public schools across all grade levels. The types of violence include physical, symbolic, linguistic, curricular and pedagogical, and systemic school. Physical violence entails bodily assaults and abuse including police brutality. Johnson et al. (2019) define symbolic violence as the metaphorical representation of violence that stems from racial pain, abuse, and suffering; it includes ignoring young children’s experience with incarceration. Furthermore, linguistic violence entails the policing and criminalization of Black children’s language such as Black language (Baker-Bell, 2020). Curricular and pedagogical violence acknowledges the overwhelming eurocentric curriculum, and the omission of Pro-Black curriculum. It also entails omitting curricula and pedagogies that decenter children’s experiences with incarceration. Lastly, systemic school violence highlights the violence naturally ingrained in school policies, customs, discourses, and practices that dehumanize Black children and youth. This also includes policies and practices that lead to the preschool-to-prison pipeline.

To that end, it is important to note that while most teachers are complicit in enacting anti-black violence in and beyond early childhood classrooms, we understand that their complicity is not always conscious but rather dysconscious in some cases (King, 1991). As such, teachers must always acknowledge and be aware of how they are complicit in anti-Black violence in order to eradicate it from the early childhood classroom. Table 1 provides an overview of the five types of anti-Black violence and specific examples of each type of violence including those that Black children experience within the prison industrial complex.

Table 1.

Types of anti-Black violence in schools adapted with permission from Johnson et al. (2019).

Types of violence	Definition	Examples
Physical	The physical abuse and assault that stem from racial discrimination and prejudicial ideologies and beliefs	• Hitting, pushing, beatingetc.
		• Lynching
		• Police brutality including putting handcuffs on young children and youth
		• Sexual abuse
		• Sexual assault
Symbolic	A metaphorical representation of violence that stems from, “racial abuse, pain, and suffering against the spirit and humanity of Black people” (Johnson, 2019). Racial epithets and slurs	• Rejecting the experiences and lived realities of Black youth
		• (Mis)reading Black youths’ culture, race, gender, abilities, and language
		• Silencing the voices of Black children and youth
		• Suspension/expulsion of young children— [the highest percentage of Black school suspensions is in preschool]
		• Ignoring young children’s experiences within the prison industrial complex (PIC)
		• Instilling fear into young children and youth via the prison industrial complex
Linguistic	This form of violence marginalizes and polices the language of Black youth which is referred to as (e.g., Black language, African American language, or African American Vernacular English) through privileging and promoting white mainstream English. Socializing Black youth to view Black language as “not good”, “broken English”, and “incorrect”	• Devaluing the connection between language, race, and identity
		• Teaching Black students and students from other ethnic groups that code-switching is the best approach to “master” white mainstream English (Baker-Bell, 2017)
		• Teaching grammar and vocabulary in isolation from the texts we are teaching and disconnected to the lived realities and experiences of youth from racially and linguistically diverse backgrounds
		• Enacting culturally irrelevant and unresponsive curriculum
		• Selecting texts in which Black youth do not see characters who look like them reflected in dynamic and positive ways
Curricular and Pedagogical	This form of violence infiltrates school curricula through teaching texts, materials, and standards that center eurocratic notions of existing and being in the world (Cridland-Hughes & King, 2015). In conjunction, the conventional curriculum provides a false narrative about Black people through promoting deficit-based ideologies which inform teachers' pedagogical and instructional practices in classrooms. In general, this is a form of epistemic violence which attacks Black ways of knowing	• Feeding Black youth inaccurate, distorted, diluted, incomplete, and sanitized versions of history
		• Presenting mathematicians, scientists, authors, and other professionals who are predominately white, monolingual, and male while omitting people from linguistically and racially diverse backgrounds
		• Omitting critical conversations from the curriculum that explore the intersections of race, gender, religion, language, sexuality, etc.
		• Failure to teach about the preschool-to-prison pipeline, educational enclosures, mass incarceration, and the prison industrial complex
		• Unintentionally and/or intentionally minimizing how teacher positionality shapes curricular decisions and pedagogical practices
		• Silencing young children and youth about their experiences within the PIC
Systemic School	This form of type is deeply ingrained within schools’ structures, processes, discourses, customs, policies, and laws which oftentimes reflect racist and hegemonic ideologies	• Underfunded and overcrowded schools
		• Inexperienced teachers and/or teachers who are not certified in the subject area(s) they teach
		• Overrepresentation of Black youth in special education courses
		• Tracking
		• Disproportionality of Black youth in gifted and talented courses
		• Zero tolerance school discipline policies/The preschool-to-prison pipeline/educational enclosures
		• Lack of educational and support services that promote a positive healthy development—physically, mentally, and emotionally
		• Policies that lead to an overwhelming presence of police officers and carceral apparatuses such as metal detectors in schools where Black children attend

The Black radical tradition and the imprisoned Black radical tradition

The Black Radical Tradition enables us to imagine liberatory futures based on our shared history and fights against anti-Blackness. As Cedric Robinson (2000) states in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Black Radicalism is “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” (p. 171). In this sense, the Black Radical Tradition is always evolving yet always revealing the ways that we, as Black people, continue to live based on our shared history. By placing emphasis on the struggle more so than “victories” or outcomes, the Black Radical Tradition displays “the collective wisdom” (Robinson, 2000) that has emerged from our fights against human domination.

In describing the origins of the Black Radical Tradition, Dylan Rodríguez (in Wilson et al., 2020) argues that:

Black radicalism is the Black radicalism created and mobilized under conditions of imprisonment and incarceration. As soon as the colonial chattel project occupied Africa, the carceral Black radical tradition emerged—rebellions against the trade and transport of captive and enslaved Africans are the foundation of the broader Black radical tradition, and the original sites of incarcerated/imprisoned Black radicalisms. (para. 1)

As such, scholars describe the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition as being created from American enslavement and co-existing, overlapping, and even moving beyond the Black Radical Tradition (James in Wilson et al., 2020).

While the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition is central to our understanding of the Black Radical Tradition (and some might even argue that they are one and the same), it is unique in that it produces texts and epistemologies that are not necessarily tethered to academic scholarship (James and Rodríguez in Wilson et al., 2020). This is important to note because, unfortunately, most prison studies scholarship originates from those on the outside; those who have never been imprisoned for any period of time (Sanchez, 2019). Additionally, as Dylan Rodríguez explains, “There is a rather widespread, normalized disavowal of the political and theoretical substance of the work generated by imprisoned radical intellectuals” (Rodríguez as found in James, 2003: p. 7).

That being said, “those impacted by prison are a socially constructed minority group” (Sanchez, 2019: p. 1654) and we must understand that the embodied texts, voices, and stories which arise from sites of incarceration are narratives from behind the concertina wire (James, 2003). As such, the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition as a theoretical framework requires us as researchers to not only look to the literature that arises from the tradition, but to continually engage in painstaking dialogue with those who have experienced incarceration. While there is little to no scholarship within the field of education which utilizes the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition as a theoretical framework, we hope that this work is a start. Because, we believe that the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition—and centering the voices of people who have experienced incarceration—reveals our connectedness to each other as Black people even across anti-Black boundaries and borders.

Pro-Black pedagogy and abolitionist teaching

According to Boutte et al. (2021), Pro-Blackness intentionally counters anti-Blackness and, as reiterated by Kinard et al. (2021), calls for “centering the humanity of Black people in classrooms day-to-day” (p. 6). Furthering Boutte’s definition of Pro-Blackness, Kinard et al. (2021) suggests that “pro-Blackness [is] necessary for liberation from the white gaze and for addressing white supremacy…” (p. 5). As such, Pro-Black pedagogy utilizes a Black gaze (Campt, 2021) to center curriculum on the lives, spirit, language, and knowledge of Black people and culture (Johnson et al., 2019). Through Pro-Black pedagogy and curriculum students are not only able to identify anti-Blackness within curricular spaces, but they are also equipped to resist, contend with, and speak against acts of anti-Black violence (Ferguson, 2000; Kinard et al., 2021). Additionally, Pro-Blackness empowers Black students to posit versions of Blackness which stand in direct opposition to anti-Black school policies.

In like manner, an abolitionist pedagogy is deeply rooted in BlackCrit and calls for centering the humanity of all children and a pursuit of educational freedom Love (2019). Abolitionist pedagogy is also, given its terminology, located within the long political genealogy of the Black freedom struggle which “positioned the abolition of ‘slavery’ as the condition of possibility for Black—hence ‘human’—freedom (Rodríguez, 2010: p. 15). As such, Dylan Rodríguez (2010) notes that abolitionist pedagogy must begin with the following questions:

Who is left for dead in the common discourse of crime, “innocence,” and “guilt”?

How has the mundane institutionalized violence of the racist state become so normalized as to be generally beyond comment?

What has made the prison and policing apparatus in its current form appear to be so permanent, necessary, and immovable within the common sense of social change and historical transformation? (p. 13)

In asking these questions, educators and students alike can not only begin to understand schooling and prisons as inseparable sites of anti-Black violence, but they are also pushed to imagine and actualize their role in the abolition of these sites.

While there are some who understand abolition as simply a project of tearing down prisons, Bettina Love (2019) reminds us that “Abolitionist teaching is as much about tearing down old structures and ways of thinking as it is about forming new ideas, new forms or social interactions, new ways to be inclusive… and new ways to establish an educational system that works for everyone, especially those who are put at the edges of the classroom and society” (p. 88). Thus, we believe that Pro-Black pedagogy and abolitionist teaching will lead us to a “radical re-imagining of Black futures within [both] the context of anti-Blackness” and the American prison state (Coles, 2019: p. 10). These are liberatory praxes which work to center those voices which are often left in the margins of educational scholarship—Black people who have experienced incarceration or have been directly impacted by the prison industrial complex. Through Pro-Black pedagogy and abolitionist teaching, we are able to collectively understand that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free” (Hamer, 2010).

Why we need prison abolition literacies in early childhood education

Anchored in the realities of the American carceral crisis, we believe our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies is a sorely needed addition to the early childhood curriculum. These realities include but are not limited to the impact of prisons on Black children and families, the need to challenge young children’s deficit perceptions of those who are incarcerated, and the lack of resources including children’s literature and other texts that focus on prisons and the American carceral crisis.

The impact of prisons on Black children and families

When early childhood educators refuse to recognize and acknowledge the experiences that Black children have with incarceration at young ages—whether through the incarceration of a family member or through handcuffs on a child’s wrists—they are validating and upholding the prison-industrial complex. Stated another way, considering the growing mass incarceration of Black people including children (Alexander, 2010; Gilliam et al., 2016), it is highly likely that most children who are enrolled in PreK-3 classrooms will know personally a family or community member who has been or will be negatively impacted by what Alexander (2010) refers to as the New Jim Crow or “the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Right movement” (p. 11). Similarly, given that schooling spaces in general and early childhood education in particular are “discipline hubs where the focus is extensively about maintaining [discipline] and order” (Wright and Counsel, 2018: p. 28), young Black children, much like Kaia Rolle who we will mention later, have been or will become victims of the American carceral crisis. For these reasons and more, early childhood education teachers must work with Black children to raise their critical consciousness about prison and its impact on their lives and the lives of family members, and inspire them to become prison abolitionists who join the longstanding struggle to abolish prisons.

Children’s deficit beliefs, play experiences, and prisons

Much like people in general, young Black children can internalize deficit beliefs about individuals who are and/or have been incarcerated. That being said, they ultimately believe that individuals who are incarcerated are ‘bad’ people rather than problematizing the anti-Black and unjust system in which they are incarcerated. Such deficit internalization can negatively influence young children’s play experiences and the dispositions and beliefs about those who are incarcerated they take into adulthood (Kinard et al., 2021). For example, we have witnessed young Black children play the game cops and robbers during which they act out the American carceral crisis as witnessed through first-hand accounts or the media and popular press. We argue that coupling first-hand accounts of incarceration with the media’s portrayal of it can further weaken young Black children’s critical consciousness of the negative impact and dehumanization of the prison industrial complex on Black people and communities.

Furthermore, when Black and white children play together, the game of cops and robbers becomes even more complex. White children may “incorporate [racialized and anti-Black] influences from the wider world” (Kinard et al., 2021) into the game of cops and robbers. That being said, white children may label themselves as the good guys (i.e. cops) and their Black co-players as the bad guys or girls (i.e. robbers; Kinard et al., 2021). Rosen (2017) has proposed that when such negative inscriptions are placed on the bodies of Black children during play interactions with white children, they become affixed to Black children’s bodies, which become extremely difficult to interrupt at the end of those play interactions and experiences. This could possibly explain why 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a Black boy who was playing in a public park, was shot by a white cop in Cleveland, Ohio (Dumas and Nelson, 2016). On arrival, Officer Timothy Loehmann misread Tamir’s body as dangerous, and threatening (misnomers and misperceptions of Black children––especially boys–– he could have possibly developed in early childhood), prompting him to shoot Tamir multiple times (Dumas and Nelson, 2016). In other words, white children’s deficit internalization of Black bodies can be detrimental to Black people long term. To that end, it is still unclear in the extant literature the role young white children’s play experiences and interactions with Black children, and their internalization of wider racialized and anti-Black influences play in their professional capacities as cops and in other positions of power and authority. As such, our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies is also an important Pro-Black pedagogical tool that can be used to shift white children’s consciousness about Black people in general and those who are incarcerated in particular.

Children’s literature and prison

Children’s literature can be used curricularly and pedagogically to help deepen young children’s consciousness of the wider world (Baines et al., 2018; Sims-Bishop, 1990). However, due to the pervasive nature of whitecentric texts––children’s literature that overwhelmingly centers white cultural ways of knowing and being– in early childhood classrooms (Sims-Bishop, 1990), we know that much like children’s books that do reflect Black cultural ways of knowing and being, books in particular about prisons, mass incarceration, and their negative impact on Black people including children and families are rarely found in early childhood classrooms and libraries. To that end, infusing prison abolition literacies into the early childhood education curriculum can inspire teachers to seek out children’s literature and other resources that can help young children not only ‘read the word, but also read the world’ (Freire, 1997) about the American carceral crisis. In the next section of this article, we review the literature on the academic and social landscape, preschool-to-prison pipeline, and the educational enclosures of Black children in early childhood education.

Literature review

In addition to the bodies of work reviewed in the previous sections to establish the need for this work, in this section, we review further literature to provide background for readers essential to appreciating the pedagogical landscape within which this work is situated.

The academic and social landscape, preschool-to prison pipeline, and educational enclosures of Black children in early childhood education

Early childhood education is foundational to the schooling experience of all children; yet, the academic and social needs of Black children are often neglected in ECE (Baines et al., 2018; Boutte, 2016). Such neglect of Black children in early childhood education (and beyond it) is informed by anti-Blackness rather than Pro-Blackness. For these reasons and more, Black children leave early childhood education without the requisite academic skills in early literacy (and math) to successfully navigate the schooling system (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016). Early literacy “entails young children’s acquisition of basic skills as consumers and producers of written and spoken language, developing joy and purpose in using a range of literacies… and the abilities to use literacy to understand and critically examine the world around them” (Bryan, 2021, p. 36).

Similarly, many ECE scholars argue that Black children are disproportionately funneled from classrooms into a preschool-to-prison pipeline that not only truncates their academic brilliance but also their future life outcomes. The preschool-to-prison pipeline is exacerbated by zero tolerance policies which criminalize young children for minor behavioral infractions in and beyond early childhood education (Wesley and Ellis, 2017). Consequently, zero tolerance policies have prompted school administrators to place school discipline in the hands of law enforcement, most of whom are not prepared to work with young children (Goings et al., 2018). For example, in 2020, a 6-year-old Black girl—Kaia Rolle—was hand-cuffed, placed in an officer’s car, and arrested for having a tantrum in class at her elementary school in Florida (Bell et al., 2022). Following Kaia’s arrest, countless other Black children have been arrested by police officers for normal childlike behaviors in schools and classrooms (see Bell et al., 2022).

Whereas early childhood scholars continue to refer to such phenomena as the preschool-to-prison pipeline, Damien Sojoyner (2016) has introduced the concept of educational enclosures to provide a more nuanced understanding of the societal and schooling conditions that continue to criminalize Black children. To that end, we use the concept of educational enclosures to more fully understand the symbiotic relationship between schools and prisons. In “Black Radicals Make for Bad Citizens: Undoing The Myth of the School to Prison Pipeline,” Sojoyner (2013) argues that the preschool-to-prison pipeline was, at its very foundation, constructed ahistorically. As a result, narratives surrounding the preschool-to-prison pipeline oftentimes miss the “critical racial, class, gendered, and sexed analyses that are needed to understand the root causes [of]… the development of education malaise and subsequent expansion of prisons within the United States” (Sojoyner, 2013: p. 243).

Additionally, the rhetoric around the preschool-to-prison pipeline often does not take into account that the very nature of public schooling and discipline policies (over policing, expulsions, etc.) are in direct response to the actions of Black students who are viewed as threatening the status quo (Sojoyner, 2013). Sojoyner further argues that with the popularization of the term and idea of a preschool-to-prison pipeline, the understanding of the relationship between schools and prisons has become increasingly narrow and has been “repackaged as a non-threatening, ubiquitous, rhetorical device” (Sojoyner, 2013: p. 244); thus, doing nothing to address school or prison abolition.

Sojoyner’s definition of educational enclosures deserves to be discussed at length as follows:

[The] term enclosure encapsulates the multifaceted processes that have brought us to this current moment of mass incarceration, intense racialized policing, and a full-on assault upon public education. Enclosure most readily signifies a physical barrier such as a wall, a fence, or anything that is meant to limit the freedom of movement. Yet, enclosure also refers to the unseen forces that are just as powerful as the physical manifestations. In this sense, enclosure is representative of social mechanisms that construct notions of race, gender, class, and sexuality; and just as important as the imposition of the physical and unseen, enclosure embodies the removal/withdrawal/denial of services and programs that are key to the stability and long-term well-being of communities. (p. 119)

In stating this, Sojoyner argues that scholars must remember that “education has [always] remained at the intersection between freedom and [the] enclosure of Black people” (Sojoyner, 2013: p. 260). Enclosures, in this sense, can be understood as a method of policing Black freedom movements through forced removal, neglect, abandonment, and separation; all in efforts to “blur the social vision of Black communities” (Sojoyner, 2013: p. 242) and deny “Black autonomous spaces of being” (Schnyder, 2014: p. 77). Because Black spaces of cultural autonomy have historically been positioned as “inherently dangerous/criminal/dysfunctional” (Schnyder, 2014: p. 79); the removal of Black students from cultural spaces and communities can be understood as a “battle to control the collective psyche in order to maintain an ideological platform that demands the disregard of Black humanity” (Schnyder, 2014: p. 79).

When Black children are forced into educational enclosures by teachers who are “first sworn to do no harm” or who are sworn to protect their safety and wellbeing (Boutte, 2016: p. 5), they have no choice but to rebel against a system that attempts to sever their minds, bodies, and souls (Leafgren, 2016). Leafgren (2016) has referred to such rebellion as childhood disobedience, which is an act that enables young children––Black children in this case–– to challenge “the context, complexity, constraints, and freedoms of the [early childhood] classroom (p. 19). To that end, we argue that in the same manner young Black children rebel against the inequities of the early childhood classroom, they can rebel against institutional structures including prisons that negatively impact the lives of those who are incarcerated. We firmly believe that early literacy practices that foster young children’s critical and Pro-Black consciousness, and awareness of the evil strictures of the prison system can provide them the tools through which they can rebel.

Early literacy practices

Despite decades of research studies that bring attention to the academic and social needs of Black children, early childhood education teachers remain committed to culturally irrelevant, unresponsive, dehumanizing, and anti-Black literacy practices (Baines et al., 2018; Boutte, 2016; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016; Beneke et al., 2022; Wright and Counsell, 2018). For example, when teachers teach early literacy, they continue to focus on “phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and grammar (which has also been promoted as the hallmark of early childhood education) in isolation from meaningful texts that reflect students’ cultures and identities” (Bryan, 2021: p. 106). Pritchard (2017) and Richardson and Ragland (2018) describe such practices as centering literacy normativity or “practices that inflict harm on marginalized groups” ––in this case Black children (Richardson and Ragland, 2018: p. 24). Literacy normativity is tethered to “white supremacist ideologies and indoctrination, and is therefore the normalization of whiteness reflected in school literacy practices” (Bryan, 2021: p. 106) that ultimately rob Black children of literacy experiences that are informed by Pro-Blackness. More pointedly, literacy normativity creates educational enclosures that are oppressive to Black children, and become foundational for the preschool-to-prison pipeline. As such, literacy normativity precludes and disrupts the teaching and practice of critical literacies in early literacy (Nash et al., 2018; Vasquez, 2016). Critical literacies––including our conception of prison abolition literacies–– focus on social issues, such as race, class, gender, and for the purposes of this article, we add the American carceral crisis.

Notwithstanding the challenges in the teaching of early literacy, we believe that early childhood teachers can invoke what Stovall (2018) has suggested as the radical imaginary or visions of what is possible in a schooling system and the teaching of early literacy not yet in existence. We hope this re-envisioning of what is possible leads to what we describe as prison abolition literacies.

Toward prison abolition literacies in early childhood education

As Mariame Kaba (2021) tells us, abolition should begin with the question, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world” (p. 3)? In the spirit of this question, we offer our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies as not only a curricular and pedagogical tool, but as a praxis with endless, imaginative possibilities. To that end, we utilize the theoretical underpinnings of Pro-Blackness, the Imprisoned Black radical tradition, and abolitionist teaching to introduce three foundational principles of prison abolition literacies. First, prison abolition literacies foreground the voices and experiences of those who have experienced incarceration in and across the ECE curriculum. Secondly, prison abolition literacies should build on young children’s critical consciousness by centering their realities and experiences and those of family and community members within the prison industrial complex. And lastly, through prison abolition literacies, children are encouraged to develop a longstanding commitment to dismantling prisons, mass incarceration, and the prison-industrial complex. Because abolition fundamentally calls for taking risks, experimentation, and constant struggle, we understand these principles as simply a start in understanding what prison abolition literacies can offer the field of ECE. Nevertheless, we believe that the introduction of prison abolition literacies will empower young children to stand in direct opposition to anti-Black structures of violence and work collectively to imagine a world beyond prisons.

However, before we discuss our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies, we must clearly state what it is not. First and foremost, this work is not concerned with the anti-Black and racist rhetoric surrounding myths which link “illiteracy” to “criminality” (Sutcliffe, 2018). For instance, some educational researchers have promulgated the third-grade-reading score-prison nexus, which means that if Black children are unable to read by third grade, they are more likely to experience incarceration. Toldson (2019) has openly critiqued such a nexus; suggesting that the third-grade-reading-score nexus has encouraged well-meaning educators and scholars to “spread fiction about [someone] planning prison construction based on second [or third, or fourth] grade reading [scores]” (Toldson, 2019: p. 11). These myths have prompted state-specific educational policies such as Ohio’s Third-Grade Reading Guarantee and South Carolina’s Read-to-Succeed Act, which purport to remediate and/or retain young children who fall behind in reading in grades K-3 (South Carolina Department of Education, 2021; Tebben, 2021). Because state and national-level data suggest that Black children supposedly underperform in reading (Arantani et al., 2011), we know that the majority of the students who will be negatively impacted by these educational policies are and will be Black.

We can see the fictitious ties between “illiteracy” and “criminality” throughout educational legislative and policy reforms which “focus on education as both a measure of criminality and a means by which to mitigate it” (Sutcliffe, 2018: p. 172). Such reforms and policies wrongfully highlight “specific inequities (illiteracy) as the root cause [of incarceration] rather than as signs of a more systemic problem” (Sutcliffe, 2018: p. 184). These notions not only serve to distract us from anti-Blackness, systemic inequities, and the deep historical roots of the prison-industrial complex, but they only point to certain types of literacies as being valuable. In addition to this, while there is much literature which points to “illiteracy” as directly ushering Black students into the preschool-to-prison pipeline (Winn, 2011) our understanding of enclosures leads us to question this very notion. While we do not necessarily want to use this space to argue against such framings, we do want readers to begin to question with us on whether such ideas serve to dismantle the prison-industrial complex or if they, in fact, further contribute to the criminalization of Black children.

Additionally, our conceptualization of prison abolition literacies does not seek to further privilege the voices of those who have never experienced incarceration. For, when considering educational programs, policies, and initiatives linked to prisons, they are largely designed with those on “the outside” educating those on “the inside” (Sutcliffe, 2018). One possible danger in these initiatives is that advocates for such programming could fall into the trap of, what Michael Sutcliffe (2018) terms, the prison literacy complex. Driven by neoliberalism, the prison literacy complex promotes a hierarchy of literacies which not only views those in prison as being “inherently deficient,” but also as “less economically valuable” (Sutcliffe, 2018: p. 178). To that end, the prison literacy complex serves to further white supremacist and anti-Black notions of literacy and disposability by refusing to recognize the experiences, expertise, and critical literacies of those incarcerated. As such, we introduce three guiding principles for what we term prison abolition literacies:

(1) foregrounding the voices of those who have experienced incarceration in the ECE curriculum;

(2) centering the realities young children have within the prison industrial complex; and

(3) encouraging young children to build a longstanding commitment to dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Foregrounding the voices of those who have experienced incarceration

With that being said, our first guiding principle for prison abolition literacies in ECE not only draws from the work of school and prison abolitionists but it calls for, what Sutcliff (2018) argues, a “voices-out” orientation in which voices are brought out from behind prison walls. Such an orientation foregrounds the experiences and voices of the incarcerated to challenge the dominant narratives which serve to uphold the prison-industrial complex. While Sutcliff (2018) is speaking specifically of literacy programs held within prisons, we believe that the “voices-out” orientation is essential to prison abolition literacies in early childhood classrooms. More pointedly, we argue that personal narratives that develop from inside prisons belong in the early childhood classroom because they “shed light on the inhumanity that goes on inside of prison, the social [and systemic] problems that lead to prison, and the humanity of those impacted by prison” (Sanchez, 2019: p. 1654).

As Sutcliff (2018) notes, “literacy must be explicitly mobilized as an agent of socioeconomic change, yet this change can only result if minds change outside the space of acquisition (whether classroom or prison cell) as well as in” (p. 186). We add that literacy must be explicitly mobilized for prison abolition, and it is imperative that ECE educators begin to actively challenge the silencing and invisibility effects of prison by incorporating personal narratives that arise from sites of incarceration within their classrooms. This guiding principle of prison abolition literacies requires educators to not only incorporate children’s literature that focuses on the far-reaching impacts of incarceration (as we discuss later in this article), but to continually engage in painstaking dialogue with those who have experienced incarceration. This is abolition; revealing our community and connectedness to each other as Black people even across prison walls.

Centering the realities and experiences that young children have within the PIC

Despite the fact that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and that millions of children are directly impacted by incarceration, there is little discussion in ECE literature on mass incarceration or its effects on young children. As such, we believe that prison abolition literacies enable educators to build on young children’s critical consciousness by centering their realities and experiences and those of their family and community members within the prison-industrial complex. That being said, teachers can hold space in early childhood classrooms and curricula so that young children can verbalize and document their personal lived realities and experiences with the prison industrial complex. Curricular experiences including Morning meeting, which will be further discussed later in the article, can be used to do so.

Encouraging young children to build a longstanding commitment to dismantling the PIC

From African enslavement to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond it, Black children have always been abolitionists. On enslavement plantations, Black children played with white children to learn English so that they could take those linguistic skills to their enslaved parents who were engaging in fugitive planning to escape the white enslaver’s plantation (Perry et al., 2004). During the Civil Rights Movement, young Black children were on the front lines of protest such as the Birmingham Children’s March of 1963 (Mayer, 2008). Recently, a video circulating Facebook highlighted a young Black girl–Wynta Amor-Rogers– chanting, “No justice, no peace” during a Black Lives Matter protest (National Broadcasting Company, 2020). As such, these acts of resistance and protest should inspire young Black children to find their place in prison abolition movements, and to make a longstanding commitment to dismantling the prison industrial complex. Early childhood teachers can foreground these historical and contemporary examples in ECE curriculum as a springboard for the possibility of young children’s longstanding commitment to prison abolition.

Infusing prison abolition literacies as Pro-Black pedagogy: Recommendations for early childhood education

Drawing on the guiding principles of prison abolition literacies, we provide a few recommendations for early childhood education to infuse prison abolition literacies as a Pro-Black pedagogy. While our recommendations are not exhaustive, we hope that what we provide will be a starting point for early childhood scholars and teachers, and that they will be inspired to build on our conception of prison abolition literacies, provide additional recommendations, and seek out other resources to infuse prison abolition literacies into the early childhood curricula.

First, because the early childhood curriculum is intentionally designed to decenter the experiences and realities of the American carceral state, we recommend that teachers seek out opportunities to infuse prison abolition literacies across the early childhood education curriculum. For example, prison abolition literacies can be infused in early math. Young children can compare and contrast the number of Black and white people who are convicted of crimes nationally, statewide, and in their communities. Such comparisons will enable them to see the inequitable sentences for Black people in comparison to sentences for white people convicted of similar crimes. It is important to note that, without using the framework suggested in this article to guide these kinds of engagements, the discussions can be misguided and may lead to inadvertently compounding the negative stereotype that more Black people being incarcerated means that more Black people are inherently “bad.” Similarly, children can also investigate the disproportionality in school discipline in their own schools, and encourage school administrators to dismantle the preschool-to-prison pipeline and educational enclosures that negatively impact them and their schoolmates.

Furthermore, engaging in prison abolition literacies requires critical praxis (Stovall, 2013) or action-oriented steps to bring awareness to the harsh realities of the American prison system. With such consideration in mind, infusing prison abolition literacies into early literacy, young children can write letters to local, state, and national leaders including mayors, governors, and state legislators to bring attention to the overrepresentation of Black people in the criminal justice system.

We know that childhood play is one of the hallmarks of early childhood education, and that young children learn about and enact wider racialized and anti-Black influences through play. Therefore, teachers can infuse prison abolition into childhood play. In doing so, young children can take a critical examination of their own play experiences. As mentioned earlier, Black children are criminalized and are positioned in deficit ways by their white peers during play (Bryan, 2021; Dumas and Nelson, 2016; Rosen, 2017). When white children misperceive the play styles and behaviors of Black children, their misperceptions lead to Black children’s entry into the preschool-to-prison pipeline, as teachers and school administrators alike are more likely to suspend and expel Black children from early childhood classrooms for minor and misperceived behavioral infractions during play (Bryan et al., in press). Therefore, teachers can help young white children examine language that may criminalize their Black peers as a way to push back against deficit labels that persist beyond play and the criminalization of Black bodies during play. Kinard et al. (2021) has recommended the use of verbal mapping as a tool to challenge anti-Blackness and the criminalization of Black children during play. Verbal mapping is a “dialogic tool” (Kinard et al., 2021); that can be used to encourage young children’s meaning-making and critical reflection. We propose that verbal mapping can be infused with prison abolition literacies to confront anti-Blackness and criminalization in Black children’s play.

Second, young Black children and families are often negatively impacted by the prison industrial complex. That being said, children witness the arrest and criminalization of family members and close family friends. Similarly, they are also criminalized in and beyond early childhood education. Therefore, we recommend that teachers hold space for young Black children to share their own experiences with incarceration. Because the experiences of Black children in general are silenced in early childhood education, this recommendation serves to center Black children’s voices pedagogically and curricularly to not only humanize them, but also better understand how the prison industrial complex troubles their lives. Given the prevalence of Morning Meeting––a curricular opportunity during which young learners build relationships and share life experience with their peers (Kriete and Davis, 2016) –– in early childhood education, early childhood teachers can enable young learners to share their experiences with the prison industrial complex. Teachers can provide support for children who choose to share if the classroom routinely welcomes variations among families lives and realities.

Third, much like the voices and experiences of Black children in early childhood education, the voices and experiences of individuals who are incarcerated or who have had experiences with criminalization are deafeningly silent in the prison studies and educational literature. For this reason and others, we recommend that teachers demarginalize these voices in the early childhood curriculum. Early childhood educators can partner with the incarcerated to create book clubs and pen pal opportunities so that young children can problematize the prison industrial complex alongside those who are incarcerated. For example, on one hand, Mr LaMar, one of the authors of this article, volunteers his time to engage in critical book studies and conversations ––which focus on the critical examination of the carceral crisis––with high school and college students across the nation. On the other hand, the high schoolers and collegians often write letters to Mr LaMar to build on conversations that were had during the book club exchange. Unfortunately, because children are socially constructed as innocent, similar exchanges are missing from early childhood classrooms. We believe that despite scholars who warn against the construction of young children as innocent (Cannella, 1997; Templeton and Cheruvu, 2020), early childhood teachers still normalize childhood innocence. And, such construction positions young children as too innocent to learn about social injustices (Templeton and Cheruvu, 2020), and interact with those who experience incarceration. As such, they are excluded from the kinds of life changing and critically consciousness-building experiences about the dehumanizing impact of prisons. Incarcerated individuals who engage with young learners to build their critical consciousness position themselves as curriculum theorists and pedagogues who are inspiring generations of young children to see prison abolition as “a praxis of human being” (Rodriquez, 2019: p. 1575).

Fourth, as mentioned earlier, children’s literature and other texts can be a powerful tool early childhood teachers can use to help build on young children’s consciousness about the American carceral crisis. And, while there are a growing number of resources available about the prison industrial complex, they rarely find themselves on teachers’ library bookshelves and in the early childhood curriculum. Early childhood educators may find the following resources beneficial as they infuse prison abolition literacies into the early childhood curriculum: (a) Kaba’s (2019) Missing Daddy; (b) Sesame Street’s Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration- Nylo’s story; and (c) Sesame Street’s Little Children, Big Challenges-Visiting Dad in Prison. Similarly, because young children are also authors of texts including children’s books (Baines et al., 2018), young Black children can be inspired to write their own children’s book about their experiences with incarceration in and beyond early childhood education.

Finally, because young Black children have always played a role in abolitionist movements, early childhood teachers can ignite the flames of and inspire young Black children to become lifetime prison abolitionists. For example, teachers can help young Black children to organize protests to bring attention to mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex in and beyond their schools. Finally, young children must understand that engaging in prison abolition is not a one-time event, but rather a lifetime commitment, and teachers must help young learners understand the importance of a lifetime commitment to the work of prison abolition.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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