Schooling Against the Prison : Education, Imagination, and the Promise of Abolition

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.