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.

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Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–25
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14687984221122990
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Prison abolition literacies
as Pro-Black pedagogy in
early childhood education
Nathaniel Bryan
Miami University, OH, USA
Rachel McMillian
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, USA
Keith LaMar
The Ohio State Penitentiary, USA
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
Corresponding author:
Nathaniel Bryan, Miami University, 210 E. Spring Street Oxford, OH 45056, USA.
Email: bryann@miamioh.edu

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 in-
carceration (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 com-
municated regularly with the 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 in-
carcerated 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.
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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 di-
mensions 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 ex-
plicitly 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
Bryan et al. 3

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 ac-
knowledges 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 dyscon-
scious 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.
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
4Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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
(continued)
Bryan et al. 5

Table 1. Continued
Types of
violence Definition Examples
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
6Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obli-
gation 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 Rodr´ıguez (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 Rodr´ıguez 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
Rodr´ıguez explains, “There is a rather widespread, normalized disavowal of the
political and theoretical substance of the work generated by imprisoned radical
intellectuals”(Rodr´ıguez as found in James, 2003: p. 7).
That being said, “those impacted by prison are a socially constructed mi-
nority 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 Im-
prisoned 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
Bryan et al. 7

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 Black-
ness 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 (Rodr´ıguez, 2010:p.15).Assuch,DylanRodr´ıguez (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
8Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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 in-
clusive…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 in-
dustrial 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’sdeficit 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
Bryan et al. 9

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 main-
taining [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’sdeficit 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 in-
carcerated. Such deficit internalization can negatively influence young chil-
dren’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 de-
humanization 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
10 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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 pos-
sibly developed in early childhood), prompting him to shoot Tamir multiple
times (Dumas and Nelson, 2016). In other words, White children’sdeficit
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 concep-
tualization of prison abolition literacies is also an important pro-Black peda-
gogical 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, I review further literature to provide
background for readers essential to appreciating the pedagogical landscape
within which this work is situated.
Bryan et al. 11

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 tol-
erance 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 chil-
dren. 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,
12 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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’sdefinition 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 “edu-
cation 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).
Bryan et al. 13

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 cen-
tering 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 indoc-
trination, 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
14 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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 con-
sciousness 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, ex-
perimentation, 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 lit-
eracies, 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
Bryan et al. 15

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’sThird-Grade Reading Guarantee and
South Carolina’sRead-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 edu-
cation 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 in-
carceration. For, when considering educational programs, policies, and ini-
tiatives 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 neo-
liberalism, 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:
16 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

(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 dis-
mantling 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 lit-
erature 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
Bryan et al. 17

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 in-
dustrial 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 re-
sistance 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 ex-
haustive, 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,
18 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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 rec-
ommend 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. 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 edu-
cational 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 leg-
islators 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 ab-
olition 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 sus-
pend 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
Bryan et al. 19

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.
Third, much like the voices and experiences of Black children in early
childhood education, the voices and experiences of individuals who are in-
carcerated 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 incar-
cerated. 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 conver-
sations 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
20 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)

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 gen-
erations 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 chil-
dren’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 re-
sources beneficial as they infuse prison abolition literacies into the early
childhood curriculum: (a) Kaba’s (2019) Missing Daddy; (b) Sesame Street’sLittle
Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration- Nylo’s story; and (c) Sesame Street’sLittle 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 ex-
periences with incarceration in and beyond early childhood education.
Finally, because young Black children have always played a role in aboli-
tionist 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.
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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