Educators bring nuance to RPL webinar on disrupting carcerality in the classroom
On April 14, 2025, Religion and Public Life hosted the fourth session of Breaking the Matrix, a five-part series of online conversations on carcerality in the United States. This fourth session, entitled, “The U.S. School System,” critically examined the education system through the lens of carcerality—a concept encompassing control, surveillance, and discipline. Elizabeth Bliss-Burger, MTS ‘25, moderated the discussion, which featured Lee Perlman, Founder and Co-Director of The Educational Justice Institute at MIT; Houman Harouni, Lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies and Associate Director at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. The talk was made available in a number of prisons through collaboration with UCLA’s Prison Education Program and Center for Justice.
The panel opened with a frank discussion on each panelist’s own situatedness, leading to specific and distinct understandings of carcerality. Edmonds framed carcerality through a structural and systematic lens, derived from his personal experience growing up as a Black man in Baltimore. “I grew up . . . in the actual case study for the school-to-prison pipeline . . . based on testing and reading scores of young Black boys and girls in Baltimore City.” For him, schools mirror carceral spaces, functioning as sites of surveillance, control, and discipline. “Schools are creating carceral agents who have to learn control, surveillance, and real confinement at every step of the way.”
Perlman, in many ways, mirrored Edmond’s perspective. Yet, where Edmonds focused on the systemic, Perlman highlighted the ethical. He argued first and foremost for the introduction of moral and humane treatment within U.S. prison contexts, saying, “The ultimate criterion is: do we recognize and treat them as human beings?” Citing his “inside-out” classes, which bring MIT students into the prison environment to learn side-by-side with incarcerated students, Perlman described the impact such exposure has on both his non-incarcerated and incarcerated students.
“When my outside students come in from their traditional universities and they take a class inside a prison, in every respect it challenges their senses. You have to walk through the port. The big steel door closes behind you. You have to do whatever the CEO tells you to do. You don’t question anything. They have a taste of the carceral system.”
For his incarcerated students, he said, “they act more like what they think it is to be themselves in an [education] setting.” Some have even told him, “When I’m in class, I’m not in prison.” Education in carceral spaces allows those inside to reclaim the human dignity that is lost through carcerality.
Harouni brought in a more philosophical and cross-cultural lens, informed by growing up in Iran and hearing the stories of his father’s life sentence, which was seen as a badge of honor for fighting against the dictatorship. As a result, “prisons for [Harouni] are not absolute evil.” He asserted that both prisons and schools can act as sites of potential transformation or spiritual formation, depending on the way control is applied. Harouni invited complexity to the discussion of carcerality, urging that we do not conflate all forms of control with oppression. For him, the crucial difference lies in whether individuals can retain agency within carceral systems. “Some systems break the spirit so the individual cannot make independent sense of their own life.” The challenge in education for him, then, is to give students back their sense of agency.
While all three educators offered specific and differing insights into the ways they use their personal and professional histories to think about carcerality, they shared the desire to transform classrooms and their carceral qualities into spaces of possibility. They also agreed that this can only be achieved through disrupting typically unquestioned assumptions and power hierarchies.
Harouni, for instance, shared the ways he intentionally disrupts power hierarchies, requiring students to take back their agency by critiquing not just the external systems, but also the internal “games” they’ve been conditioned to play to even get to university-level education. In this way, Harouni builds an environment in which students question and critique the very systems—including his role as their instructor—that shape them. “If I do my job right . . . my students develop a tremendous amount of mistrust,” Harouni commented on his teaching pedagogy.
Questioning the system of education itself, Edmonds presented an example of disrupting the carcerality of time in the classroom. He experiments with class start and stop times, sometimes having abrupt ten-minute classes, and other times holding classes that go on for hours. This, for him, challenges the students’ associations between productivity, surveillance, and academic success. “I randomly start and end my classes . . . The idea that we’ve got to use up and maximize all the given time is something that haunts many of my students.”
The process of disrupting carcerality in the classroom requires a balance between challenging existing systems while still offering love, structure, and painful self-reflection as educational tools. Perlman, for instance, strongly rejected “do-gooderness” in favor of genuine and authentic engagement, echoing that his students “don’t want to be treated that way. I just try to be as real as I can with them.”
Perlman reflected that being real also means emphasizing a pedagogical approach that engages both head and heart, showing up as full people and encouraging students to do the same. For Perlman, this means asking yourself, as an educator, “How can I stop just going in and teaching a class? How can I make sustained communities? You’ve got to stay with people and you’ve got to commit to them.” Particularly when working with communities that lack trust and stability, taking on this role is essential because it helps mirror a holistic way of showing up that gives his students permission to do the same: “What I most want to expose people to is themselves,” Perlman said, which will ultimately allow him, as an educator “to get out of the way and let them be there for each other rather than filter it all through me.”
During the Q&A section of the panel, the educators reflected on the role of despair and hope. For them, hope is not simply optimism but an act that should create room for space, improvisation, and new futures. Perlman identified escapism, which he has seen come in many forms, from drugs to social media, as an attempt to cope with despair that does not inspire hope. Transforming “escape” into an act that inspires hope, Edmonds said, means asking, “What does it mean to escape, to run, to be a fugitive?” It means “leaning into hope [itself].”
There followed a striking question about voluntary versus involuntary carcerality. Is a monk’s cell, for instance, not the same as a prison cell? Harouni and Edmonds pushed back against this by arguing that true carcerality is not just about physical confinement, but about “the diminishing of access . . . the harshness by which we do away with the possibility for people to know themselves, the natural world, the other more fully,” as Edmonds said.
Harouni added that “you can also be in a voluntary cell and be within all kinds of structures that are involuntary, and you’re not even aware of them.” Harouni separated this from the “sheer dehumanization” that happens within physical carceral spaces.
Harouni ended the panel with a dream he had that illustrated where he hopes to be going with his teaching. He described teaching a class and trying to provoke his students to engage and watching them leave, one by one. “By the time the discussion became something real, there were only about 15 or 20 students left. They were all ex-cons. One of them started singing this beautiful song [and] another one started beating their fists. Through that singing [they] proved that something else was possible between us.” Yet, this fragile space they created together proved difficult to sustain. Shame and self-doubt of their own vulnerability crept in, and eventually even this final group of students left. Harouni describes walking out with them and getting lost on his way back to the classroom. “By the time I finally found it again, I was there by myself. I remember in the dream I said: Now sit down, and I’ll teach myself.”
The task of the teacher in school systems coated in carcerality is vital and includes bringing hope, imagination, and defiance into the classroom to challenge the assumptions of systems of restriction and limitation. Harouni, Edmonds, and Perlman agreed that it is essential for teaching to be holistic and extend beyond the classroom. As Edmonds closed out, “Teaching and learning doesn’t begin and stop with the syllabus—it’s part of who we are and how we build community.”