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

Schooling Against the Prison, the newest volume in Haymarket Books’ flagship Race and Education series, is also the inaugural release in the publisher’s new trade imprint, 8 Story St.

In this bold abolitionist manifesto, Marc Lamont Hill exposes the carceral logic embedded within American education and challenges readers to rethink discipline, space, language, and imagination so that schools become places of freedom rather than control.

We are living in an age of mass incarceration, and its influence extends far beyond prisons. Hill argues that America’s schools have been deliberately structured to mirror the carceral state, with heavily policed hallways, zero-tolerance policies, high-stakes testing, and disciplinary systems that prioritize surveillance and punishment over learning and growth.

Inside, readers will discover:

• How welfare systems, standardized testing, and child "protection" policies have been used to marginalize vulnerable communities.
• How to challenge the prison’s influence on our institutions and our collective imagination.
• How schools can replace suspicion, surveillance, and punishment with care, trust, and meaningful human connection.

Written for educators, parents, community advocates, and anyone committed to educational justice, Schooling Against the Prison offers both a powerful critique of today’s punitive school culture and a compelling vision for transforming education into a force for collective liberation.