Dismantling the Carceral State in Educational Practices: Centering Collaboration and Voice of the Formerly Incarcerated to Enact Transformation

Rectifying the injustices of mass incarceration and its lasting impact on practices in urban educational contexts necessitates a collective effort. Attempts to understand and change unjust carceral systems must include the voices of people these systems affect most. This article examines how centering the voice of our co-author, who was formerly incarcerated, resulted in changes in the other authors’ various education practices working toward greater equity in STEM. We use equity-oriented scale-making as a framework to examine complexities in social movements. We present six autoethnographic narratives demonstrating the power of centering and amplifying the voice of our formerly “caged” partner. Our findings suggest that listening to and acting on one voice of the incarcerated experience can be the lever for transformation across scales of practice. We conclude with a discussion and recommendations for how others might replicate similar centering processes.