Refusing a compulsory want for revenge, or, teaching against retributive justice with liberatory pedagogy

Retributive justice serves as a punitive foundation on which Western education is organized. It relies on paternalistic notions of moral goodness with the teacher embodying moral perfection and academe serving as the “neutral” ground on which a student learns to be a “moral” actor. In turn, students of marginalized intersectional difference “pay” for their incapacity to perform correctly. We reject retributive impulses as violent enactments of power. Our goal is humble and direct: abolish the prison industrial complex with everything we've got. And we believe pedagogical contexts provide a relational means to critique and imagine a world free of prisons.