This course mines writing about incarceration and writing by the incarcerated across cultures and history in an attempt to comprehend how the U.S. has arrived at its current use of prisons and jails. How is this current situation related to our history of slavery? And how is it related to our founding Protestant tradition which suggests that we are born into Eden free, commit a crime for which we are cast out, remaining forever after in a shameful bondage from which it is our sacred duty to escape? We will investigate the long western tradition of captivity/incarceration/bondage/slavery narratives many of whose underpinnings go back to this Edenic story. With the help of local guests working in prison abolition, artists working in prisons, and through many different genres of writing and reading, we will explore how, individually and as a culture we have internalized the paradox that we need to be bound and punished in order to be free, lost and wandering in order to be found. Among others we will read excerpts from J Bentham, writings and survey of The Panopticon Prison Project and designs; Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; images and writings by Kathe Kollowitz; Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete; view The Birdman of Alcatraz; look at images writings and interviews from Abu Ghraib; view and read about Ai Weiwei's @Large Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz; The Critical Resistance Collective, Abolition Workgroup: Abolition Toolkit; view documentation of San Quentin's Prison Arts Project on display at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 2014, among many other readings and viewings.

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