Schooling Against the Prison
Education, Imagination, and the Promise of Abolition
Marc Lamont Hill author H Richard Milner editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Harvard Educational Publishing Group
Publishing:17th Nov '26
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 17th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This title, Schooling Against the Prison, is the latest title to be released in our flagship Race and Education series. It also takes the honor as the first title to be released as part of HEP's trade series, 8 Story St.
A bold abolitionist manifesto that exposes the carceral logics of schooling and challenges us to redesign discipline, space, language, and imagination so education serves freedom rather than control
We are living in the age of incarceration—and nowhere is its grip more tightly held than inside our schools. In Schooling Against the Prison, Marc Lamont Hill examines how American schools have been designed from the ground up to serve as extensions of the carceral state, rife with policed hallways, zero-tolerance codes, test-obsessed classrooms, and discipline systems that mirror the logic of the prison.
Drawing on education history, policy, and real-world stories that tell of the shocking reality of carceral excess—from kindergarten "tantrums" treated as crimes, to parents jailed for truancy, and teachers prosecuted as racketeers—Hill exposes how schooling, welfare, testing, and child "protection" have been weaponized against Black, economically marginalized, disabled, queer, and trans communities. In response to this crisis, he argues that we should seek strategies that replace suspicion and surveillance with care and connection. The book then provides specific practices (curricular, disciplinary, architectural, and political) for loosening the prison's hold on our imaginations and our institutions, so that schools can become places of safety, scholarship, and joy.
For educators, citizen advocates, parents, and anyone who refuses to accept punitive culture as common sense, Schooling Against the Prison is both a devastating diagnosis and an invitation to transform schools into places of collective liberation.
"Marc Lamont Hill has given us a book of prophetic imagination. He traces how the classroom has been engineered into a staging ground for cages —from mugshots and metal detectors to the architecture of the buildings where our children learn. But this is not only an indictment. This remarkable book will leave you with what Hill calls 'unreasonable faith' that we can and must build the loving, caring communities our children need and deserve." - Michelle Alexander
"To build a world without prisons, which means the end of schools as prisons, we need the work of Marc Lamont Hill. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of schools as prisons and how we build a new, post-carceral world. Marc offers, with great detail, love, and care, not only alternatives but also a vision of how we possess the intellectual, spiritual, and creative resources to build with our imaginations what we know is possible in our bones. My dream is that all who teach pick up a copy and dream with Marc." - Bettina L. Love
"Schooling Against the Prison is a brilliant, urgent reimagining of the relationship between education, punishment, and freedom that shows how carceral logics shape schooling far beyond the familiar 'school-to-prison pipeline': through discipline, testing, family policing, surveillance, architecture, and our very capacity to imagine a world without prison. Marc Lamont Hill's 'pedagogy of abolition' offers a powerful framework for replacing punishment with care and for building post-carceral schools and other institutions grounded in liberation. Essential reading for anyone committed to abolition—and to education animated by radical hope." - Dorothy Roberts
"In Schooling Against the Prison, Marc Lamont Hill asks us to think about 'what if schools could help us build a world without prisons?' The book encourages readers to reconsider how education, punishment, and power are connected. Hill shows how schools can sometimes reinforce the same systems of exclusion and confinement they should help us move past. Rooted in restorative justice, collective care, and radical imagination, Schooling Against the Prison presents a powerful vision of education as a tool for liberation. It urges us to shift from punishment to repair, from criminalization to healing, and from the world we know to the world we can create. This thought-provoking and timely book invites you to imagine what liberatory education could achieve." - Mariame Kaba
ISBN: 9798895571385
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
200 pages